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BA flight cancelled, compensation refused because of the “percentage” rule
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Just wondering if anyone who knows anything about cancelled flights can please advise!
BA cancelled my flight from Berlin to London on 29/12 and rebooked it to the following day. Although the weather on 29/12 wasn’t ideal, no other flights from Berlin to London that day were cancelled – so there absolutely were no weather-related reasons for the cancellation of my specific flight.
However, BA have refused to pay the standard delay compensation because “… Due to bad weather, we are asked to cancel a percentage of flights, not all flights, as they need to restrict the amount of arrivals and departures…”
Is this right? Even if this were to be true, to me this still implies that BA took the operational decision to cancel my flight in particular (rather than any other flight they could have picked to hit this mystical percentage), and presumably the compensation they would be due to pay to affected passengers would have been factored into this choice.
Is there any point in chasing this further (though admittedly trying to chase anything with BA Customer Relations is like repeatedly slamming your face into a wall), or is this “percentage of flights” thing just a get out of jail free card that BA can play whenever it wants?
Thanks!
Yes this is correct. Airlines are given a broad exemption in situations like this when ATC places capacity constraints on airports. And the constraint could have been at LHR rather than BEE.
That other flights operated is neither here nor there.
@Raskolnikov – this is totally standard and applies to all airlines, not just BA. The choice of which flights to cancel relates more to the ease of rebooking, so routes with multiple daily flights are more likely to be cancelled, low load flights are at risk and few long haul flights get cancelled because the disruption would be much greater.
Thanks. I guess it’s kind of annoying because effectively it means the airline can choose to cancel whichever flight(s) they choose – ie they can make an operational choice about what best suits/benefits them to cancel (and of course they’ll have made quite a saving on staff and fuel costs).
Just wish I’d gone for a more expensive hotel/room to charge BA for the night (especially given what they were charging for an economy Berlin to London flight the next day, which they must have thought was an acceptable last-minute price for that), or booked 2 rooms (ie one room for each of us, rather than sharing) so that I’d at least have got a few more IHG points out of it – but I’ll certainly know better next time.
(And given that I only flew BA twice last year and they messed things up both times – and 3 months on I’m still waiting to hear about the downgrade reimbursement for my Tokyo flight – I’m pretty sure there will be a “next time” 🙂
The ‘choice’ of the flight to cancel isn’t as easy as you may think it is.
If BER ATC say ‘restrictions between 14.00 – 16.00’ than BA only has one flight to LHR during that time so that’s the one it will cancel.
Any ‘svaings’ on crew and fuel will soon ve exceeded by the claims for Right to Care – especially if people deliberatly bump them up.
The CAA normally publish LHR specific advice because of this very rule. They list affected flights here as “pre-tactical cancellations due to forecasted adverse weather”: https://www.caa.co.uk/passengers-and-public/resolving-travel-problems/delays-and-cancellations/making-a-claim/am-i-entitled-to-compensation/
If your flight isn’t there, you may be able to push it. But it may also be that the CAA/LHR hasn’t published a list as it was more last minute.
Given that you say there didn’t appear to be bad weather on the day or any other cancellations, I would start by asking BA to prove the existence of the weather-related restriction they refer to, and also ask them to confirm who they were requested to cancel flights by (and prove the existence of that request).
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