Let me start off with I am very pissed off at BA, and how they handled this situation For clarity purposes, I will stick to just the facts:
Beginning of May I book two one-way tickets ZRH-LHR, 7:00 am in the morning for 23 June. Total cost: ~250 CHF.
I have a surgery scheduled in London for 23 June.
Today, just before 6pm I get a text that my flight has been cancelled.
I call BA, fuming. Useless off-shore customer service idiot says it is weather related.
London forecast for tomorrow is partly cloudy, low of 17, high of 25. A quick search online suggests ongoing disputes with the unions.
Useless off-shore customer service idiot offers to rebook for later on Friday. We reach an impasse and I hang up.
I book just one one-way flight with Swiss for the same time. Total cost: 241 CHF.
Both flights end up getting automatically rebooked for later that day.
I would like to receive some compensation from BA for their giant screwup. What is the most that I can claim from BA? Ideally I would like to receive the fare difference + whatever damages the EU law allows for (250 euro in this case?)
What should I do about the passanger's flight? Should I book her the same Swiss flight? This is a pretty big expense for us, having to spend an extra 500 CHF on flights.
Your flight may be the return of the annulled BA 720 which had a scheduled landing time at 22:35 at ZRH. No aircraft can land in Zurich after 23:30 unless it is an emergency.
LX 339 from Heathrow will just barely make it in time before closure.
Flights from the City Airport, Luton, and Gatwick are mostly on time. Seems to be a very local weather phenomena at Heathrow which existed the whole day.
Some flights from Germany are also delayed. But that is indeed due to weather (Thunderstorms).
We are back home. I ended up booking a flight for my passenger as well, so now we spent nearly 500 CHF extra for the SWISS flight. Needless to say, the SWISS flight had no issues.
BA has so far refunded the original ~250 CHF we spent on their flight. I also filed a claim to make up the difference in ticket price plus the 500 euros compensation for the cancelled flight. I will update the thread with the outcome.
I hope you get the refund. Fyi: even in 2008 BA used to cancel their flights on the DAY of departure for no clear reason. In my experience, it was 2 out of 5 flights FROM switzerland for some reason. So if it makes you feel any better, this stuff happens...
Generally it's a message of emphatic support, sorry i have no constructive advice.
Last year I had a flight delay and BA also were not honest about the reason. I tried to make the claim with BA, which I suggest is what you should do first.
If that leads no where, give airhelp a shout (link below). I thought they were very good, simple easy, and got me a win. They take their cut but I was happy with the compensation I recieved.
FWIW I flew BA recently for the first time in years. Was out just before and back just after the IT screw-up weekend. Piss-up and brewery are the words that come to mind for both legs.
I'm going back to my basic rules - avoid BA and never, ever, Heathrow.
British Airways still insists that the cancellation was due to weather and has denied both of my claims (additional cost of booking the flight on SWISS and compensation for the cancellation).
I am not giving up though. I decided to use Airhelp to pursue BA for compensation. I will keep my thread updated when I have further updates.
You are aware that the reason your flight got canceled is because the flight to Zurich the evening before was canceled? There was simply no BA plane in Zurich which could fly back to London.
That's fine, but should a lack of planning on BA's part force me to have to incur an additional 250 CHF in expenses? What is the incentive for BA to improve their service if they can screw over customers without any financial impact to their top or bottom line?
My wife was booked to fly BA0738 LHR to GVA leaving 19.55, it was cancelled as I was boarding an Easyjet Luton to GVA a couple of hours earlier. She did not arrive until the following day & no hotels were available around Heathrow.
I have a claim via complaint.resolver.co.uk, had an acknowledgement but no payout as yet
I do not know what their incecitive is and I also do not belive the "it was the weather" excuse either.
I just want to point you that you should not focus on what happened on June 23 (except that they had no plane in ZRH) but on the situation on June 22. Important is what happened to BA 720, as the plane of that flight would have been the plane of your flight back to London.
As I said, many flights from LHR were delayed on that date some up to an hour, but nearly no flight from any of the other London and "London" airports had any delay.
LX 339 has a scheduled take off at 20:05 (Terminal 2) and landing at ZRH 22:45
BA 720 has a scheduled take of at 19:45 (Terminal 5) and landing at ZRH 22:35
On June 22 BA 720 got canceled, LX 339 took off at 20:40.
I initialiy though it will be a bit tight to make it before aitport closure at 23:30. But the original flight plan allready has a 20 to 30 minutes buffer for delays as the actual flight takes most of the time less than 1 hour 20 minutes.
It is interesting to see that you got your message allready at 6pm MEST, that would be 5pm London time, around three hours before scheduled take off of BA 720.
As I said in my June 22 post, there were heavy thunderstorms over Germany at that date. We would have to look what actual aircraft was intended for BA 720 and where it was before it arrived in London and when it arrived in London.
With a paid subsription for www.flightradar24.com you should able to do this. maybe some EF member can do this research for you or you use the 7 day trial (do not forget do read, understand the fine print and cancel it in good time). If you see that the intended airplane was stuck in Germany than you know the answer: Weather after all.