EXTENDED: BA stops selling tickets for ALL Heathrow short-haul flights until 15th August

British Airways has just circulated a note to the travel trade to state that the ban on OUTBOUND short haul ticket sales from London Heathrow has been extended.

There are now no tickets available for travel up to 15th August.

As we wrote in our article yesterday, 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.

To clarify what this means:

• you cannot buy any short haul flight, to any destination, on British Airways from London Heathrow for travel up to 15th August

• you CAN buy inbound flights, if you choose to travel out on another airline

• existing ticketed flights are not impacted

For a route such as Oslo that is only served by British Airways from Heathrow, here is what you see for 12th August:

If you thinking of booking a British Airways flight for travel from 15th August, you may want to lock it in now. If you don’t, you may find that you can’t book at all …..

(If you didn’t take my advice to do this when I wrote it in the article yesterday, you would have lost out if you needed to travel between the 9th and 15th.)

Here is the note sent to travel agents today:

“Last week we wrote to you advising of actions we were taking in response to capacity capping at Heathrow Airport.

We communicated that we would review our actions this week and would like to provide you with an update.

To help maximise rebooking options for existing customers, we’ve decided to take further responsible action and limit the available fares on some Heathrow services.

Short-haul flights departing from Heathrow will now be closed for sale until 15 August 2022 in all channels. These flights will not be available to book via ba.com or via our partners.

We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause and would like to thank you for your continued patience and understanding.”

British Airways issued a statement yesterday to say:

“As a result of Heathrow’s request to limit new bookings, we’ve decided to take responsible action and limit the available fares on some Heathrow services to help maximise rebooking options for existing customers, given the restrictions imposed on us and the ongoing challenges facing the entire aviation industry.”

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