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Share your BA shut-down experiences …. and BA adds £16 to Expedia etc bookings

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I don’t try to pretend that I’m an expert on things I don’t understand.  That’s why I am going to spare you my thoughts on the impressive British Airways shut-down yesterday.

There is plenty of in-depth coverage without a paywall at The Guardian, BBC News etc.  It does seem that, this time, the failure went far beyond the FLY passenger management system which has been the cause of most meltdowns over the past year.

I was just lucky that, despite it being half term, I’m not actually on a BA flight until next Friday.  It is a minor consolation for me given that we booked into a UK countryside hotel this weekend just to find that the weather forecast for today and Monday looks appalling …..!

If you were caught up in the chaos yesterday or the consequences today, feel free to share your experiences in the comments to this article.

PS.  Given that BA’s outsourcing of its IT operation will have played a large part in the poor response yesterday, it does not bode well for the BA call centre in Newcastle which I understand is on the verge of being transferred to Capita.

British Airways to introduce an £8 fee on third party bookings

Back in 2015, Lufthansa took a brave leap and imposed a €16 fee on every ticket booked via a travel agent or indeed anyone who used a ‘global distribution system’ such as Amadeus, Sabre or Travelport.  The airline claimed that it was paying up to €18 in fees for every ticket sold and wanted to encourage passengers and agents to use its own website.

Many thought that Lufthansa would backtrack but it held firm.

British Airways and Iberia have now decided to add their own £8 / €9.50 per segment (so £16 for a return flight) fee from 1st November.

It isn’t clear what the impact of this will be on the leisure market.  Only BA knows what percentage of leisure passengers book on, say, Expedia versus ba.com.  How many passengers, when they see British Airways on Expedia costing £14 more than easyJet, will know that BA is actually £2 cheaper if booked direct?

The share prices of Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport all fell on Friday by up to 4% (see this Reuters report) which implies that the market believes trade customers will simply move to booking direct.  Concur, for instance, claims that it will be able to integrate direct booking seamlessly into its system so that corporate users see no change to their current booking process.  Leisure travellers won’t do that if they are not educated that direct booking is sharply cheaper.

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Comments (221)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Billy says:
    28 May28 May 09:33

    BA still charge CC fees (albeit capped at £20) whereas Expedia do not. I will still check both although I still prefer having control over my booking, which often is not the case with non direct bookings

  • Rebecca McCullough says:
    28 May28 May 09:35

    I was meant to fly back from Paris last night. It could have been a lot worse… I went to the airport and after about half an hour in the queue I was booked on an air France flight home.
    My issue I hope someone can help with, is that this was the final flight I needed to take with BA to get my status changed from bronze to silver. I’m fact that entire trip was so I would get this. The rest of my flights this year with BA are booked using avios and I wanted the status upgrade so thought an overnight trip to Paris would be the easiest way to do it. Does their computer failure has meant I’ve wasted a fair bit of money and and did an overnight trip for nothing?

    • Rebecca McCullough says:
      28 May28 May 09:38

      Just a side note, I realise I wasn’t stuck anywhere so can’t really complain but I don’t have a whole lot of money so wasting £300 is a big deal to me! And that’s unfortunately how much the trip cost.

    • BA says:
      28 May28 May 10:08

      For involuntary changes to another airline, BA will give you the original tier points and avois you would have got if you took the flight. You have to request this from CUstomer services though.

      (Rumour has it you can also double dip and credit your AF flight to a FB account as well on top…)

    • JP says:
      28 May28 May 11:18

      People are doing these things just to acquire BA silver? No wonder IAG profits were soaring (until yesterday)

  • Angmo says:
    28 May28 May 09:37

    Does booking direct mean that eventually our bookings won’t be accessible on the likes of MyFlights app?

    • Rob says:
      28 May28 May 09:53

      BA still uses Amadeus for storing flight data which is why BA.com bookings show there. It is tricky to exist totally outside the GDS loop unless you are a low cost, no partners, airline.

  • TripRep says:
    28 May28 May 09:44

    Rob, we know you’re not an expert on mission critical IT infrastructure or an Avaition compensation lawyer.

    But we still value your wealth of experience and your own opinion, tremendously.

    I appreciate you’ve had little time to write a detailed view on whether you think BA should pay compensation under EU261 and it might also currently be difficult to analyse the vague excuses that BA have offered (along with insincere apologies)

    However, hopefully later this week you will scribe a piece on how to claim for EU261/2004 for delays and cancellations for this specific event, it could be a rewrite of previous articles and will be a very popular article to the HFP community affected this weekend.

    And given the new interest we may also see your subscribers top the 10,000 mark.

    Slightly leftfield – How many votes would Jeremy Corbyn win, if he stated he would make EU261 a proactive automated payment under known criteria? As a floating voter I’d back him.

    • John says:
      28 May28 May 10:17

      That would be nice, but I wouldn’t believe him.

      I really don’t think air passenger rights are a major consideration for most UK voters

    • mark2 says:
      28 May28 May 10:24

      I agree that compensation should be automatic, but assume that you are being ironic about voting for Jeremy Corbin!

      • JP says:
        28 May28 May 11:21

        Another educated Tory….who cannot spell.

      • TripRep says:
        28 May28 May 11:23

        “Slightly Left field” 😉

        But I am surprised spin doctors have yet to make a Polictical football out of passenger right on this.

        I would wager that approx 50% of working population earning above £20k take a flight of some sort once a year.

        • Genghis says:
          28 May28 May 11:26

          You’re probably right on the stats but I don’t think EC261 compo is at the top of most people’s wants

    • marc says:
      28 May28 May 11:44

      The reality is, the majority of pax (average) have no clue what EC261/2004 means, neither that they may be able to claim 250/400/600€ compo.
      But hey, if you know it, better for you.

  • Andrew says:
    28 May28 May 09:57

    A different angle from me. Flew INTO lhr yesterday at 1530 from Istanbul and sat on the tarmac for an hour. Cabin crew and captain exemplary considering they were the same crew on the 7am morning flight out to Turkey. Pilot and first officer let people into the cockpit and everything. Great service considering they had been up for over 12 hours and wanted to get home too. Consider myself very lucky we were allowed to take off from Istanbul in the first place. Pocket of BA staff that went the extra mile.

    • CV3V says:
      28 May28 May 10:02

      I remember being delayed on a BA plane and the captain letting kids n parents into the cockpit, jealous was I (flying alone, no kids to borrow).

    • Alan says:
      28 May28 May 16:55

      Excellent idea from that crew actually – make the most of the time on the ground to at least make it a bit more interesting for pax 🙂

  • BA says:
    28 May28 May 10:03

    If you are on a week long holiday due to start yesterday, your options are:

    – as your flight was cancelled and you will be delayed >24h, you can use travel insurance to abandon your trip and get all your money back
    – wait for BA rebook. You will get EU261 and hotel/food until the rebook. You will not get any money back for missed holiday days.
    – pay for your own flight on another airline to your destination. You are at risk doing this. You will not get EU261, BA may well cancel your return flight, and BA are under no obligation to give you any compensation. You will get the cost of your original flight back.

    • TripRep says:
      28 May28 May 10:10

      What’s your source on this? What interpretation of the EU261 law are you quoting?

    • Js says:
      28 May28 May 10:25

      Hmm. You will get the €200/300/600 compensation on all 3 of these as BA cancelled the flight. Unless the power outage turns out to be terrorism, then it would e.g. an extraordinary circumstance, but I do not believe this is the case.

      In 1) you will get ALL your costs back such as hotel, Disneyland passes etc.
      2) is correct, but BA have now said they will voluntarily pay ‘reasonable’ costs – so they might pay for lost days
      3) you will still get the EU261 compo, but not the hotel/refreshments until your rebooked flight. BA are not under obligation to give you the difference between the BA flight and you last-minute one on a new airline, but as above they have voluntarily said they will pay ‘reasonable’ costs.

      I must say, especially if I were doing a shortish ex-EU trip and stuck in London, I would go for 1) and claim the avios and TPs for the flight from BA later.

  • Rupert says:
    28 May28 May 10:20

    Didn’t apreciate it at the time but I was clearly very lucky on Saturday. Flew into LGW from JFK at 1000 with 1100 connection to AMS. Whilst about to board the captain came out and addressed tbe crowd, appologising that BA’s global IT was down and they didn’t have the legal paperwork to continue, so were looking for workarounds. “Make yourselves comfortable and get a cup of tea as we may be here for some time”.

    At 1240, 2 mins after an update of “no news, next update in 20 mins” boarding was called. Then more wait as all loading calcs were done with pencil and slide rule, and finally take-off at around 1300.

    Don’t know if it was related, but on Monday 22nd I’d found the BA app and online record of these flights inoperable, yet my other booked flights in June fully accessible. That continued throughout the week, and even the BA staff on the phone couldn’t help or check me in. At JFK checkin was without problem.

    Suspect from the little tidbits floating around that the IT problem was systematic, progressive and several days in the making…

    Iirc, SAS became famous amongst buisness recovery folk in the early 2000s for triplicating its entire datacentre operation with many miles between each, so that if a plane was to crash into one at least one of the others could pick up the demand in a matter of seconds. What we don’t know yet is if this BA problem was one where redundancy could have helped. There are IT situations where no ammount of backup would have been able to relieve the situation any faster. Suggest we let some facts emerge before castigating BA’s IT policy.

  • Voda_boy says:
    28 May28 May 10:38

    BA Gold helpline, 60 minute wait at 10:30am BST (call answered 11:30am) for flight rebooking.

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