When a British Airways ex-Europe trip goes wrong

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• James says:

  31 May31 May 08:06

  For my ex dub in sept I am using Ryanair for this very reason. The tickets are £10 (I am travelling HBO) that I simply booked 2 tickets… One 2.5 hours after my BA flight lands – the primary all goes well flight, and a backup 4 hours after that.

  Am overnighting on the outbound.

• Zoe says:

  31 May31 May 08:22

  We had Aer Lingus redemptions a couple of years ago. I booked us onto the last (Flybe) flight out of Southampton the night before figuring that if that got cancelled, their first departure in the morning would still give us plenty of time for the connection. On the way back we also stayed overnight in Dublin, catching the first Aer Lingus flight in so that even if we were bumped to the second one it would still work.
  This may seem over cautious but we had through tickets from Heathrow to Miami via Barcelona for a cruise the year before, we were bumped off the second sector and missed our boat and 3 nights of the cruise. In this case Princess Cruises had booked the whole package (almost entirely paid for with Tesco points) but were worse than useless in helping us sort out the mess. It also wasn’t covered by insurance as we hadn’t missed our first departure. Iberian did put us up overnight, hand out cash cards with 600 euro each and get us to Miami the next day, about an hour after our boat had departed…

  • Polly says:

    31 May31 May 08:45

    Zoe, I don’t understand why you were bumped, were you on reward flights or staff . I was only ever bumped off as staff, never on reward though. Just curious.

    • Zoe says:

      31 May31 May 09:11

      Hi Polly we were on a cash booking, I couldn’t manage to check us in online. At Heathrow they couldn’t check our bags right through but told us not to worry just check in on arrival in Barcelona ( I think there was about 3 hours connection time). We wondered why the Spainish family in front of us were making such a massive fuss at the check in desk, it soon became clear when we were told the flight was full and were directed to customer services to be re-ticketed. It turns out there had been some industrial action the day before and this was the knock on effect. Princess Cruises flights department were open but unable to find us a routing that would get us to Miami in time, the original booking did have an overnight in Miami getting onto the ship at lunch the next day. Iberian flew us to Madrid then on to Miami the next day. On arrival there we discovered they had lost my daughters luggage so we had to wait for that to arrive 24 hours later then book a flight to St. Martin. Got an iPad stolen on that journey just to top things off. Inspite of all that my teenage daughters rate it as one of our best holidays ever. Princess did give me a substantial refund but it took about 3 months so by then I’d shared my poor opinion of them far and wide.

      • Polly says:

        31 May31 May 10:34

        Wow what a saga… It’s such a battle sometimes just to get on a plane these days, wonder why we bother! Hope all goes well next time for you…

• Cheshire Pete says:

  31 May31 May 08:39

  Last year we had 2 day trips across one weekend, the main aim being they were upgraded via PAUGs to CE for tier points, totalling 160 for our Saturday and Sunday flights to Madrid and Geneva. We also had 2 nice days out!

  A text message arrives around 3pm Saturday afternoon whilst in Madrid stating our 9pm flight back, the last one of the day, had been cancelled! Obviously they gave an expensive UK Number to ring! Anyhow we decided to just head back to the airport and got changed to an earlier flight in good time.

  Good job we got the notification really as I often wonder what would have happened to our Geneva flight very early the next morning if we had got stuck in Madrid!

• Charlie says:

  31 May31 May 09:03

  Can someone explain what the “ex” part actually stands for?

  • Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

    31 May31 May 09:21

    Latin for ‘from’

    • Charlie says:

      31 May31 May 10:34

      Thank you

• Leo says:

  31 May31 May 09:28

  Interesting read, thanks.

  How or where is it possible to check historical flight delays?

  • @mkcol says:

    31 May31 May 11:59

    Exactly what I was wondering & trawling through this whole thread to see if it had been asked – thanks!

• Rich says:

  31 May31 May 10:55

  A good reminder that we don’t control everything and that we often run our lives too close to the wire…..In my opinion!!
  I do ex Ams using the Rail and sail on Stena and it is easy, stress free and good value.

  • Aeronaut says:

    31 May31 May 11:35

    I was at Schiphol at the BA check-in desks a while back where a guy was absolutely losing the plot over the fact that he’d been bumped from the last flight to Heathrow (indeed the last flight to London) – he ‘absolutely had to be at his desk at work’ at 8am the next morning, BA had a ‘duty’ to get him home that night etc etc. He hadn’t checked-in online, nor had he arrived with that much time to spare.

    I was sorely tempted to remind him what his journey would have involved say 110 years ago.

• Chris C says:

  31 May31 May 12:35

  Using the left luggage at either LHR (when he landed there in the morning (and handy for his later ex-Dub arrival) or at LCY in the evening.

  Yes it would have been a little bit less convenient with possibly an extra trip to collect it etc but so much cheaper.

• Oliver says:

  31 May31 May 13:07

  Thanks for the lessons to learn. Whenever I book separate tickets like this I keep 24 hours between them, especially long haul flights. Short haul I might cut it closer if there are frequent flights.

  I hope this story makes others take notice of this risk

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