British Airways has stopped selling tickets for short-haul flights from Heathrow

British Airways has decided to suspend the sale of tickets on short haul flights from London Heathrow for travel today (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday).

This may be extended beyond Saturday but a decision has yet to be taken.

This appears to have been done to both meet Heathrow’s capacity caps and to give BA flexibility to move passengers whose flights are cancelled at short notice.

Here is the notice circulated to the travel trade a few minutes ago:

“To further support this goal and minimise additional close-in bookings which risk us exceeding the caps, as well as to enable us to reaccommodate any passengers whose flights are impacted at short notice, we’ve made the difficult decision to temporarily limit access to inventory on short-haul flights from London Heathrow, currently until the 30th July.

For technical reasons, we still need to permit access to BA office ID’s / IATA’s to allow us to reaccommodate passengers which consequently means that you may see some inventory available via ba.com that is not available via any GDS or via NDC.

Please be aware that the aim of this additional action is not to favour or drive last-minute sales via ba.com at a time when we’re operating within strict capacity caps and are encouraging customers to voluntarily move their travel plans to alternate dates. For technical reasons, we’re simply unable to open British Airways inventory designed for passenger reaccommodation without the side effect of also enabling some minimal selling.

We don’t intend to keep this additional short-term measure in place a moment longer than necessary and will be reviewing next week with a view to lifting it as soon as we possibly can. That said, we do want to be open and transparent in that limited inventory will continue to be a challenge in all channels for carriers operating from Heathrow until the capacity caps are removed. 

We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause and would like to thank you for your continued patience and understanding as we work through this challenging period together.“

Whilst travel agents have been blocked entirely from selling tickets, some ba.com availability remains bookable because this is the only way that agents can rebook. However if we look at, say, Amsterdam for tomorrow, this is what you get:

The Business tickets being sold are fully flexible ones, at £681 each way …. if you’re willing to pay that then BA will ensure you get on, even if someone else does not.

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