British Airways stops selling tickets for ALL short-haul flights from Heathrow until 8th August

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• megoi says:

  1 Aug1 August 15:50

  On Saturday night I was checking my flights to Corfu and nothing was available for sale until the 9th.

  Feels like it will be a summer of very little availability and the ridiculouly high prices will persist.

  • Brian78 says:

    1 Aug1 August 16:15

    Winter will probably be better because demand is seasonally lower but it’ll still probably be a shambles

• Rory says:

  1 Aug1 August 16:10

  I definitely called this last week.

• babyg says:

  1 Aug1 August 16:13

  perhaps its also to stop people gaming the system.. .book any LHR-xxx flight (points) until the 8th, and the move to your favourite school holiday date…

  • Ls says:

    1 Aug1 August 17:29

    As far as I can see, there’s no gaming here. You will have your XXX flight next week, and not be allowed to move it.

    • Rob says:

      1 Aug1 August 17:38

      There is gaming potential but not there. Last week, for example, there a window of a few hours when you could have booked a Heathrow short haul flight for the coming week and then immediately change the date to whenever you wanted.

      • Richie says:

        1 Aug1 August 19:52

        What was the cash outlay though?

        • Rob says:

          1 Aug1 August 21:30

          Nothing if you booked Avios seats.

• Frankie says:

  1 Aug1 August 18:03

  Rob, I see Simon Calder is quoting you on his Twitter!

  • The Streets says:

    2 Aug2 August 08:30

    And on the main article of The Times today

    • Rob says:

      2 Aug2 August 08:44

      and The Telegraph, and The Sun.

• RoundTheWorld says:

  1 Aug1 August 19:48

  SAS also flies direct from Heathrow Terminal 2 to Oslo, but nothing available this week too.

  • Ian says:

    1 Aug1 August 20:52

    I think he meant BA only flies to Oslo from Heathrow, not Gatwick or City.

• Richard says:

  2 Aug2 August 06:46

  The race to the bottom for BA. I think thry may have reached it. People need to move on from BA. A very average overrated airline now from what was a great airline many many years ago

  • Brian78 says:

    2 Aug2 August 07:00

    To be overrated, something has to actually be highly rated by people

    • Russell G says:

      2 Aug2 August 10:39

      Spot on Brian! So many people compare BA to BA of the past rather than comparing to other options (on the same routes) now. We’re not living in the past, we’re living in the conditions of now so past comparisons are just silly. People like to complain about BA but these same people are rarely heard seriously saying they prefer Easyjet or Ryanair or any other airline for the same route. Yes, state subsidized long haul carriers beat BA on some routes, but BA has mostly cut down /cut out F on those routes and upped it’s J game with the new Club Suite. I’ll admit I rarely saw a good decision from Mr Cruz when he was around, especially regarding his decisions around IT, but I still find BA to be the best option in the UK for 90% of flights I take.

  • Catalan says:

    2 Aug2 August 08:01

    @Richard. You said that last week. Yawn

    • Gordon says:

      2 Aug2 August 08:43

      Ahh @Catalan @Richard might have a get out clause as there is a typo “thry” Did last weeks comment include this typo? Lol

  • Evan says:

    2 Aug2 August 08:36

    I thought we’d moved on from the phrase “race to the bottom”….

• Charles says:

  2 Aug2 August 07:31

  My wife’s had a classic BA experience with a flight for this week – flight was cancelled, so she was told to rebook, however BA never actually ticketed the initial booking in the first place due to an admin error so she couldn’t do that via the website. Eventually managed to rebook over the phone yesterday, however that hasn’t been ticketed either yet and it’s not completely clear whether she’s going to be able to fly. I’d assume that they’d have to honour any booking that was ticketed and charged but I’m not sure what the situation is with bookings that haven’t.

• John says:

  2 Aug2 August 07:41

  Naïve question (!) but why did airlines, airports and handlers make so many redundancies when the UK’s exceptionally generous Covid furlough scheme was designed to prevent this very outcome?

  • Rob says:

    2 Aug2 August 07:47

    Furlough finished last September but air travel was still dead. It also wasn’t covering full salaries.

    • Lady London says:

      2 Aug2 August 08:50

      And why should furlough have covered full salaries? Given the expenses removed from not having to physically go to work 80% was more generous than it could have been.

      You effectively seem to be saying the airlines wanted a completely free ride on employee costs.

      • J says:

        2 Aug2 August 08:57

        There’s a difference between the scheme being generous to the employee and generous to the employer.

  • JDB says:

    2 Aug2 August 07:48

    Because even with furlough, they still had to pay 20% of salaries, plus NI contributions and pensions etc. which adds up to quite a lot when your revenue had collapsed and there was little visibility as to when it might recover. IAG still lost something like €3bn in 2021 and an even bigger loss in 2020.

  • Marcw says:

    2 Aug2 August 07:55

    Generous Covid furlough. Lol

    • Toby says:

      2 Aug2 August 08:20

      Paying c80% of employee costs is pretty generous.

      • J says:

        2 Aug2 August 08:51

        More like the bare minimum. Paying 20%+ to hold onto staff that can’t even read an email you send would be a struggle for most businesses.

    • Rob says:

      2 Aug2 August 08:47

      Very generous if you made up the names of people who you claimed worked for you and took furlough for them or, claimed for people who were still working a full day. The genius of the UK system is that employees never knew if their employer was claiming furlough for them.

      • Panda Mick says:

        2 Aug2 August 09:18

        If we were to hazard a guess at how much Sunak wasted through gross incompetence, givne Rob you have a financial background and are quite well placed, where would you say this was? Trace and Trace was an abysmal merde ville, but surely the fraud of furlough MUST eclipse that?

        • Rob says:

          2 Aug2 August 09:52

          Bounceback loan fraud is already estimated at £5bn.

          Certain things you can forgive, but giving out £50,000 loans to with no background checks companies which were literally incorporated the day before (and you can check this data in 10 seconds at Companies House online) and where the directors disappeared the day the money appeared is clearly incompetent bordering on negligent.

          You can even say the money is being ploughed back into the economy by the fraudsters because most were set up by people outside the UK.

      • Brian78 says:

        2 Aug2 August 11:13

        “The genius of the UK system is that employees never knew if their employer was claiming furlough for them.”

        I don’t think it did. I did some research with an employment lawyer (as I was at risk of redundancy) and the employer had to get your consent. Of course they could ignore the rules as there weren’t any checks etc to stop fraud

        • vol says:

          2 Aug2 August 11:38

          And if an employer had magicked up employees as I think Rob suggested somewhere in the comments above, then the employer could easily get the consent of these…employees, I’m sure 😀

        • Rob says:

          2 Aug2 August 12:50

          Exactly – if your signature was faked you never knew about it.

          I know some airlines operating in the UK (not BA) were expecting fuloughed management staff to work from home – we were still dealing them as usual.

      • Gordon says:

        2 Aug2 August 19:58

        The Below from BBC News,

        More than 16,000 businesses which took out a type of government-backed Covid loan have gone bust without paying the money back,

  • Nick says:

    2 Aug2 August 08:48

    It’s very easy to say with hindsight that staff shouldn’t have been cut, but in the time and place would you have done the same? There was a serious fear the entire industry would collapse, and travel restrictions were still in place (and being increased) well after furlough ended. At one point the government actively encouraged airline workers to move outside because they wanted to end their financial support.

    • Panda Mick says:

      2 Aug2 August 09:23

      No hindsight needed. People left the UK because of Brexit, taking with it a workforce that was willing to do the work. You only needed to walk through the estate at the back of me at the start of the pandemic to see how people just abandoned london en masse. This workforce isn’t going to magically re-appear, so this problem is not going away. And each time a bag is lost, a flight delayed, it’s costing someone money. Probably more than retaining the staff in the first place

    • Colin MacKinnon says:

      2 Aug2 August 10:01

      I made sure everyone connected with my business would survive.
      If all around us went down the tubes, then being the last one standing would be of little advantage. We’d have had no customers!
      So if we went down the tubes too, it wouldn’t have mattered. Therefore we planned and invested for recovery – since we don’t run on debt. A very old-fashioned view of business, as a result of my formative years being the 1970s (three day week) and the 1980s (18% mortgages)

      • Rhys says:

        2 Aug2 August 12:04

        Back in summer 2020 it wasn’t even clear if travel would come back in the same way. I read hundreds of opinion pieces wondering whether it was the end of business travel etc etc. It’s hard to plan and invest for recovery if you don’t know what level recovery will be!

        In reality, demand bounced back far more robustly than anyone expected – it isn’t like post 9/11 or 2008 at all, which were the closest things most people were comparing it too.

        • Brian78 says:

          2 Aug2 August 18:58

          Airlines predicted that demand would go back to pre covid levels in 2024 didn’t they?

          That’ll probably be spot on, given that despite the recent increase passenger numbers in the U.K. are still well below pre covid levels. Even more so in Asia etc

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