BA flight cancellation and rebook c£2k claim rejected – advice please
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Update on this, my friend has now received a response from BA but they have refused to pay out for the rerouting costs. Annoyingly, BA’s wording which includes reference to “expenses” suggests they are responding to her original claim (which was lengthy and for multiple things, including out of pocket expenses incurred for overnight accommodation and food) rather than the very specific tight wording she resubmitted based on the helpful responses here simply asking for rerouting costs due to cancellation because the pilot was out of hours. She says that because she had already opened a claim on the booking reference, she was unable to open a new and separate claim for the rerouting costs and so could only add to the original claim. Any suggestions please? Is it worth her now pursuing this as a complaint to BA? I’ve (fortunately) never had to submit any kind of claim to BA so I don’t have first hand experience of how the online forms work.
I’m not sure why your friend doesn’t post directly rather than playing chinese whispers, but anyway she is already dealing with the ‘complaints’ team which they call Customer Relations. If she wishes to escalate the matter, the hurdle she has to overcome is that if a passenger goes off piste and makes their own rerouting arrangements, an airline is entitled to refuse to reimburse them for such costs. This is expressly covered at 4.2 of the Interpretative Guidelines:-
However, where an air carrier can demonstrate that when the passenger has accepted to give his or her personal contact details, it has contacted a passenger and sought to provide the assistance required by Article 8, but the passenger has
nonetheless made his or her own assistance or re-routing arrangements, then the air carrier may conclude that it is not responsible for any additional costs the passenger has incurred and may decide not to reimburse them.She needs to build a careful case to justify why she made her own arrangements and I’m not sure if the £2,000 to which you refer is net of any refund that BA would still pay as that needs to be clarified. My gut feel is that BA is baulking because of the quantum as they aren’t usually too bad on this type of claim. The three stage legal test that your friend needs to meet is the as right to care expenses, the rerouting costs must be necessary, appropriate and reasonable. There is obviously some overlap with the justification for going it alone.
@JDB thank you for sharing the relevant clause. As mentioned previously, the reason she made her own arrangements was that she was offloaded at midnight and amid the need to find last minute overnight accommodation for her and her daughter on the Sunday night, she wanted to ensure she was booked on a flight for the Monday as she was already due to be back at work then (flights already very full and expensive due to it being the weekend of the Hungarian grand prix). I don’t think she was aware that she would need to go into MMB to see what the options were – this is obviously unfortunate in terms of justification for the claim. I believe the value of the rerouting costs for the two BA tickets is a little under £1k.
@ExpatInBerlin – I’m afraid your friend’s actions don’t help her case at all, but it doesn’t need to be terminal to her case. Forgetting, MMB for a second, it’s a fairly basic principle that if one is going to spend a substantial sum of someone else’s money (eg employer, client, airline) you really need to clear it with them first if you expect to be reimbursed.
I still don’t understand the costs incurred. It makes a difference as to ones prospects and how to proceed. The original post said the two new tickets cost £2k whereas the last post said £1k for both.
She essentially has the option of getting a refund for the two unused tickets and then claiming for the difference, preferably telling BA this is what she intends to do unless the full sum is paid within 14 days.
She needs to draft her further response based on the late hour of the cancellation, BA’s failure to advise passengers on the spot of their rebooking options or indeed any of their rights even verbally, let alone in writing as required by Article 14(2). The rebooking was made at a time when BA’s UK reservations line was closed, she needed to get back for work/school etc so ultimately had no option but book flights herself to cover for BA’s failure to comply with statutory requirements. As the return flights purchased were on BA no actual loss has been incurred by BA, the passenger was merely giving effect to the rerouting that would have been provided by an agent had such agent been on duty. Obviously whatever she writes must be true – I’m guessing some aspects.
For good measure I would add something along the lines that in the circumstances the passenger acted entirely reasonably and that as the costs incurred meet the strict legal test of being “necessary, appropriate and reasonable” any CEDR adjudicator or county court judge would agree so it makes little sense to waste BA’s or the passenger’s time and incur unnecessary costs testing that proposition. I therefore look forward to full settlement within 14 days – no later than xx October. The letter needs to be very firm and business like!
When she gets paid, she owes you a large drink for acting as her whisperer.
@JDB I have just spoken to my friend and she says the cost of the new flights for two people was £1,300 (in Economy) and these showed on the BA app when she booked as being the last two seats available on the flight. My understanding now having spoken to her again is that the original c£2k figure she gave me also included for the out of pocket accommodation and food expenses she incurred for which she managed to get £563 back from BA. Thank you for the advice on the additional information she should now provide. Would you recommend she now sends this as a hard copy letter by post to BA rather than via the online form please?
So, 2 sets of tickets cost ca 2000 and second set of tickets is less than 1000, meaning first set of tickets is ca 1000.
Can’t your friend simply claim 1000 pounds refund for (unused) first set of tickets, meaning she would end up with the same amount of money in her pocket?@ExpatInBerlin – there is no right or wrong way of doing this, but I would be inclined to respond to the refusal saying BA has either misunderstood the claim or made a mistake and provide the new information. Your friend needs to keep a copy of what she sent. After 14 days I would send a hard copy letter to the BA legal team.
Some will say to go straight to CEDR but I wouldn’t because BA might put together a case that would just persuade an adjudicator to decide in their favour.
The point I made and spelled out further by @Oviplokos1 above does matter and still seems muddled. Once she is clear on this, your friend might be advised to split it out on a per person basis and a total rather than a single lump sum.
I’m geniunely stunned that it’s becoming this complicated to get a refund on the new tickets considering they were booked on BA and the airline owed them a rerouting obligation anyway. The net loss to BA is zero, unless BA wanted to cynically direct those on the cancelled flight to a later service and hoped to pocket the cash from the last minute ticket sales on the early flight. Reality is these were likely to be sold anyway to someone on the cancelled flight who followed exactly the same course of action. This should be an open and shut case but it’s turning into anything but. It doesn’t give me any confidence in dealing with BA if I ended up in a similar situation in the future, albeit like all experienced travellers I’d know to check MMB first to see the rebooking options I was being offered, but I understand why someone less au fait with these matters, and in the absence of any e-mail or in-person guidance at the airport might then book replacement flights with the airline in a panic, particularly if there was a pressing need to get home by a certain time.
@JDB thank you, I will advise her accordingly. Hopefully I will report back soon that there was a successful outcome!
@Londonsteve I agree, I hoped that even though she jumped the gun by rebooking herself, by self-rebooking on the BA flight that BA themselves would have presumably rebooked her on anyway it would be less of a problem than if it had been another carrier. I think the additional out of pocket overnight accommodation expenses may have hampered this.@Londonsteve – you are right about the principle but there is an established process for rebooking/rerouting so if someone elects to go a bit rogue (even if for good reasons) they would be well advised to observe some niceties before spending someone else’s money. This isn’t a BA thing. Any airline may take issue and the law offers the airline an explicit get out, and actually that’s rare in the APR. While it isn’t spelled out in so many words, the intention and purpose is that you must first give the airline the opportunity to reroute you and if you don’t, you are at risk of not getting reimbursed. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
The effect of the passenger opting for DIY rerouting in this thread has been effectively to reverse the burden of proof, so it’s up to her prove the expenditure was necessary at all. I suspect she didn’t realise how her action switched that burden, so she didn’t claim in the right way. Hopefully it will now be OK.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written, JDB, I even agree with the principal of the law that states you need to give the airline the chance to sort to it. Surely it would only realistically apply if you’ve booked yourself onto another carrier, for reasons of cost, convenience, because you fancied flying with someone other than BA or whatever. In this case the hapless traveller ended up flying on the flight they’d have likely flown on anyway and therefore other than a warning to avoid doing the same in the future along with a cheque for their refund, I wouldn’t expect BA to play hardball and seek to get out of paying via a strict application of the law. If I was on the receiving end of this treatment, after THEY cancelled the flight (and presumbably abandoned me in BUD late evening without any ground staff on hand to assist), that would be emphatically the last time I’d ever fly with them.
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