British Airways extends free rebooking of all short-haul flights to Friday

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• Tony says:

  31 Aug31 August 08:23

  So the Club A,C,D and F seats get a meal, unlimited drinks. The economy pax in B and C seats don’t!! Too right, B and C have possibly only paid 10% of the Club fare.
  Have the BA engineers had to remove all the middle seat tables on the older A320s?!

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    31 Aug31 August 08:48

    That’s not what is happening.

    The middle seat is being filled with other CE passengers not economy,

    • Stu_N says:

      31 Aug31 August 12:40

      The tray table either swings up from underneath or folds out the seat back on those planes that have it. The 320 and 321 NEOs don’t have one at all.

• Michael C says:

  31 Aug31 August 08:43

  Would be quite funny to see A and C wafting their croissants/champers under B’s nose and getting constant refills!!

• Willmo says:

  31 Aug31 August 08:51

  Is the 3 abreast CE showing in expert flyer?

  Flying from BCN on Saturday and it’s showing 2-2, wondering if that is accurate or not

  • Stu_N says:

    31 Aug31 August 12:41

    It was showing as 3+3 on ExpertFlyer seat maps earlier in the week, so if your flight is back to 2+2 you should be OK.

• Oli says:

  31 Aug31 August 09:20

  What are the chances that this rebooking gets extended into mid next week? We are due to fly to FCO on the last flight of the day on Wednesday but would now prefer to fly on Thursday morning (avois booking). Flights for Wednesday night are ~£800, Thursday morning ~£200. Given BA are focussed on freeing up seats would it be worth riding up to see if an agent could do some proactive rebooking? – can they do this or are they constrained by BA rebooking policy?

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    31 Aug31 August 09:29

    They are obviously constrained by the rebooking policy.

    If you ring up now they would count it as a voluntary change which would attract fees as well as there needing to be avios availability on the Thursday flight.

    I don’t see policy this being extended past the weekend and as I type this even an extension to the weekend hasn’t been announced so there may not be one.

• Craig Vassie says:

  31 Aug31 August 12:36

  I did ATH-LHR yesterday evening. The Club cabin was compacted up to just five rows and 29 pax, leaving BA with 18 extra Economy seats in rows 6-8. I was the lucky one in Row 2 who had an empty seat next to me due to a no show. It all worked, with no whingeing, and a hard working and very attentive bunch of cabin crew dishing out the booze like there was no tomorrow. Baggage took an hour to come through to the belt though!

• twoclicks says:

  31 Aug31 August 15:31

  @Rob A couple of comments: Tues night CAI — LHR they were doing the old “we need to use the middle seat” routine. However none of the flights were cancelled due to the chaos (route unaffected), begging the question, who was in the middle seats? Well I’ll tell you who! A non-status family upgraded and 2 BA employees! If you had no middle seat, especially on a longer route, check that there were actually cancellations on your route. If there were not, then I think pax have good case for compensation. And no, they are not re-routing passengers via CAI. And yes they are overselling — confirmed by cabin crew.

  Also, if you rebook an Avios ticket, will it credit with TPs? Anyone experience?

  • ChrisBCN says:

    31 Aug31 August 19:30

    I wonder if another airline had cancelled flights… Maybe BA are taking passengers from them, and the other airline is taking BA passengers from another airport.

    Or maybe they have swapped to put a smaller plane on this route so they can use a bigger plane elsewhere.

    Or perhaps it’s a savvy business decision that can be blamed on something else.

    • ChrisBCN says:

      31 Aug31 August 19:31

      I.e. it’s not an open and shut case for compensation…

      • twoclicks says:

        31 Aug31 August 19:50

        Having asked extensively, there were no passengers rebooked from other airlines or destinations. Crew expressly told me that the route was unaffected by the disruption, and that J was oversold — based on others’ comments, I’d say “business decision,” but not “savvy” as you say — just unethical!

        • ChrisBCN says:

          31 Aug31 August 21:03

          I think you need to brush up on your facts, rather than hearsay… (How ‘extensively’ can you ask anyway, did you set up a gateline and not let anybody pass?).

          Checking flight radar 24, flight MS 779 CAI>LHR was actually cancelled the afternoon before. That meant there was a plane load of passengers (who knows how many) stranded.

          From a BA crew perspective, there was no disruption on the route. They may or may not have known about the Egyptair cancellation.

  • NorthernLass says:

    31 Aug31 August 20:37

    How do you know the family had no status?!

• Shaun says:

  31 Aug31 August 15:57

  I’ve got a flight tomorrow morning (LHR>MAD) and wanting to move it to later in the day. I called the gold line but have just been told under disruption policy they can change the date but can’t do a differently timed flight on the same day. Anyone else had this? Sounds weird. If I wanted to change outside of disruption policy it will be 3.3k!

  • Oviplokos1 says:

    31 Aug31 August 16:03

    Change it to different day and then back to original day but different time?

    • JDB says:

      31 Aug31 August 17:08

      You can only make one change under this CB4D policy. The same applies for rebooking after cancellation etc. it’s one chance only.

  • Aristeides says:

    31 Aug31 August 20:13

    I changed a flight from OSL to this morning from this afternoon and then changed it back again with no problems.

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

      31 Aug31 August 21:25

      That would be under the same day change provisions not the disruption policy.

      Two very different things.

• BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

  31 Aug31 August 18:33

  The “disruption” header is no longer on the BA landing page so I’d say that the change policy won’t be extended after it lapses tomorrow.

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