If you have taken full advantage of the 355 days advance booking period, you may have a British Airways Avios redemption or cash ticket from Gatwick booked for next Summer.
If you do, I recommend you have a look at your booking to see if it is still active. BA tends to take a few weeks to contact people and, by then, your most convenient alternative may be gone.
BA announced a substantial number of cancellations to the 2016 Gatwick Summer schedule yesterday. This appears to be the result of long-term mechanical issues which will see an additional A320 aircraft no longer joining the Gatwick fleet. Marrakech and Malta take the biggest hits.
The cancellations are:
Cancelled for the full March – October season:
Genoa – 1 flight per week (6-8 remain)
Glasgow – 1 flight per week (26 remain, no great loss!)
Nice – 3 flights per week (20 remain)
The following will be cancelled for, roughly, the Summer school holiday period:
Marrakech – 2 flights per week (3 flights will remain)
Catania – 1 flight per week (7 remain)
Malta – 2 flights per week (5 remain)
Dubrovnik – 1 flight per week (7 remain)
Other:
Verona – 1 flight per week (2-3 remain), non-school holiday periods only
Tenerife – 1 flight per week (5 remain), May / June only
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They not only take a few weeks to inform you, you then discover that calling pretravel or EC as appropriate is not as helpful as you think it should be. You then resort to contacting pretravel in writing, your message goes to the wrong department but you only find out a few weeks or months later when you receive an unhelpful reply from the wrong person. You reply asking them who to write to and you are advised you should call pretravel or EC. You ask to make a formal complaint and they are at a total loss to explain how this can be done. Welcome to BA 2015, little wonder they are no longer the worlds favourite airline I’m sure their customer service will be making an appearance on watchdog sometime soon.
Don’t write pretravel, just call the appropriate reservations number. If the call doesn’t go as planned, leave the booking as is and hang up and call again later.
If you want a semi-quick response, try Twitter, but generally, only write in for something after travel is complete and a response isn’t needed so urgently.
Thx Jaxba, I will try calling again on my return from my current trip. I remain unimpressed that they have no formal complaints procedures.
“Glasgow – no great loss!” …. maybe not to you Rob ….
I was hit with this.
The ‘my flights’ app informed me of the change way quicker than BA did.
We were booked GLA-LHR-LCA-LGW-GLA. BA have cancelled Larnaca out of Gatwick too. We have been offered the alternative of returning via LHR, an option we’d previously dismissed as it involves an overnight stop in LHR. Unfortunately, as we’d already commited to hotels etc, we’ve run with it but taken the opportunity to see / stay with our friends in West London for a couple of days on the way back, albeit we’ll still need a Heathrow hotel for the first night as the flight gets in at 22:25 and I wouldn’t want (or even ask) to turn up at theirs at midnight.
I guess this was the ‘price we paid’ for trying to blag one last free connecting flight. The trip cost us 20,000 Avios, a 2-4-1 (we had 4 to use), and £70. I think now, it would been 29,000 + 2-4-1 + £140. Booking with cash was a ridiculous £1,200 at the time of booking!
PS: BA we’re happy to change our final leg back to GLA to a couple of days later!
The My Flights app is fantastic for this sort of thing as you can rebook before the crowd. You also get immediate warning of equipment changes which is handy when flying Qatar or Etihad!
Is this the dubious practice of anouncing routes in advance, seeing how sales go then cancelling down accordingly, circumventing EU regulations which allow an alternative to be offered sufficiently far in advance? Willie Walsh, little by little, has trashed BA’s reputation.
I was unfortunate enough to experience sister IAG airlines Air Nostrum and Iberia Express last week. I had major schedule changes just before the EU compensation cut-off deadline, paid-for extra legroom seat reservations lost and allocated to other people, no reply from customer services or Iberia Plus, eventual legroom really not fit for humans and delays on top. Did I want to pay €5 for a glass of poor wine? No, it really should have been on the house.
The Manchester to Gatwick link was cancelled a couple of years ago effectivelt cutting the North of England off from a huge number of BA routes. A few trims at Gatwick now make zero difference.
Possibly Barcelona also. My booking on BA2710 on 14 June and BA2709 on 20 June was cancelled.
Rob I think it’s only one a320 that won’t be joining the fleet. This is due to ‘structural defects’ with the aircraft. i could well be wrong though.
Indeed having checked numerous fleet listings it’s only one a320 that has been cancelled.
Thanks. Weird they can’t find another to charter and refit by March.
Is that really the issue? The Aer Lingus aircraft wet leased to Virgin Little Red will become available for redeployment within IAG. Unless Aer Lingus has a need for those aircraft operating routes out of Dublin (which presumably wasn’t the case previously) one of those could be repainted in BA colours….
Is it perhaps that IAG is losing slots at Gatwick as a condition of the Aer Lingus acquisition? If so that’s a slightly one since there are unused slots available at Gatwick, albeit not a peak times.
…odd one….
And are they not keeping the odd ball G-MEDK??
Alicante seems to have been badly hit as well. My flights for April and June (daytime flights) have been cancelled and I have been moved to an 11pm flight (which is no good when I am travelling with 2 young kids). Seems that the daytime flight is cancelled at the weekends but runs weekdays only.
There’s also frequency increases at Gatwick over Summer. These are :
Venice (VCE) – 5 additional flights per week
Turin (TRN)- 2 additional flights per week
Naples (NAP)- 1 additional flight per week
Pisa (PSA)- 2 additional flights per week
Heraklion (HER)- 2 additional flights per week
Faro (FAO)- 1 additional flight per week
Thessaloniki (SKG)- 1 additional flight per week
Seville (SVQ)- 1 additional flight per week
Tenerife (TFS)- 1 additional flight per week
Gatwick frequency increases for part of the summer season:
Salzburg (SZG)- 1 extra weekly service 13JUL16- 07SEP16
Bodrum (BJV)- 1 additional weekly service 13JUL16- 07SEP16
Naples (NAP)- 1 additional weekly service 15JUL16- 09SEP16
Tirana (TIA)- 1 additional weekly service between 14JUL16- 09SEP16
Lanzarote (ACE)- 1 additional weekly service between 02APR16-16APR16 and 17SEP16-29OCT16
Cagliari (CAG)- 2 additional weekly services between 10JUL16- 11SEP16
Faro (FAO)- 1 additional weekly service between 11JUL16- 12SEP16
BA didn’t send me that one!
Our Rome flight was cancelled by BA from Gatwick for next April. It was the 8.30 flight, so only option from LGW was to re book on the 4.30. Do you know if they are dropping down to 1 a day on this route?
To be honest since they ruined Club Europe I now mainly fly Easyjet and pay for the front seat. This is normally 50-30% cheaper than a standard BA Economy seat, while due to me having a Priority Pass I still get lounge access. For me the only time I fly BA in Europe is if I need to fly at very short notice and there is an Avios redemption and/or if there is an option from City as that’s only a straightforward 30 minute journey from mine.
Flew Vueling BCN to EDI on Tuesday. New plane, decent legroom, nice staff. No real need for BA short haul any more
Good timekeeping? I was thinking of using this service too.
We were booked on the Sunday Malta fight in August they auto booked us on the Monday but took little persuading to but us in the Saturday
I’d got a reward booking outbound LGW->FUE booked for late August, went to book the return for 3rd September 355 days out and it never appeared. They then cancelled our outbound flight on Tuesday evening – to be fair they text me straight away and emailed my wife (who’s in the household account and part of the booking) although not me. After a short call to customer services yesterday, my Avios are back in my account but I haven’t had the cash refund through yet.
I’m pretty hacked off with the whole experience, we’re now faced with either forking out for Easyjet or Ryanair flights to FUE or trawling through the very limited reward availability to elsewhere on our dates.
There seems to be plenty of availability to Crete if that suits? I’ve just switched my return so I hit Gatwick at 10.30pm on a Saturday rather than 5pm Friday rush hour. Also gives us 2 extra full days.
Thanks RP, yes I’ve been looking at Crete. Doesn’t quite work as nicely as FUE but may go with it. Got some other options too.
I’d booked a redemption flight one-way from Dalaman to LGW for early May 2016 – this has been cancelled too.
Called BA and they’ve refunded the avios, still waiting on the £35 fee though.
Funnily they’ve assigned my booking reference onto someone else’s new booking so now I have a LHR-JFK flight for December showing on my account. A free flight as compensation perhaps?
Unless you’re actually seeing someone else’s name in the ‘recycled’ PNR, the JFK segment should just be a dummy segment in your own cancelled booking. PNR codes do get reused but it usually takes a year or two. Have a look at the flight status in checkmytrip.com – if you can access the PNR using your name then it’s still yours.
It looks as if, for DBV, they’ve cancelled the early morning Thursday departure from LGW but kept the lunchtime one – at least that’s what’s showing for the Thursday we’re booked on in May, although August seems to still be at 8-weekly (early morning daily plus lunchtime Thursday from LGW).
It also seems as if they’ve blocked Y bookings whilst they sort out rebooking existing passengers because the entire week we’re booked, Y now seems “not available” or “sold out”.
Had booked GLA-LGW-LAS CUN-LGW-GLA for June 2016
The last leg to GLA is now cancelled and we’ve been rebooked from LHR. Any chance of BA paying for the £55 LGW-LHR airport transfer?
nice, they just canceled my flights to teneriffe, which i booked with a 241 voucher. is there any chance i get the voucher back? was issued through avios but expired 3 weeks ago.
In that sort of situation I’d demand the voucher was reissued with a new expiry date given it’s totally their fault.
That doesn’t sound right. Unless it has recently changed, the expiry date on the BAPP 241 vouchers is use by (for the outbound flight) rather than book by, so if it’s already expired you wouldn’t have been able to use it on those flights.
Or are you talking about something different such as the companion ticket on the Lloyds Avios Premier rewards card?
There’s at least one BCN flight cancelled too – because we were on it. Now rebooked to LHR.
I don’t understand the Malta cuts. They need more capacity, not less. There have been at least 4 separate trips that I couldn’t make on BA to Malta due to the planes being sold out.
Of course there are also those last few seats available on alternative days for £450 one way. I’m sure the boffins at Waterside have “done the math(s)” to work out whether putting on larger aircraft will generate enough demand with lower priced seats, but if you cannot rely on a carrier to supply week-round service, you will inevitably look elsewhere. After all, the other carriers to Malta are all in a race to the bottom (apart from EasyJet who are ok, and Ryanair who have already staked a claim to the mineral rights at the bottom)
My flight to LCA (Cyprus) was cancelled from LGW.
Received an email from BA about 3 weeks ago.
Phoned BA and they kindly rebooked me a flight (2 A+1 Child) from heathrow instead.
Fits nicely with my return flight to LHR.
All using Avios redemption. Happy Chappy here.