BA / Qatar baggage story ….

[ayearinmx]

I booked an economy return LHR-DOH Avios flight with BA, outbound 8th October, inbound 6th November arriving 1140 where I’d then get picked up. I’m BA Gold / OWE. I took 2x 32kg bags (including bicycle). I did all this via the BA website. On Oct 11th, my BA return DOH-LHR was cancelled, so my options were BA to LHR at 7am or QR to LGW at 6am. I live nearer Gatwick and can take the train to near my house and can get picked up from there. I can’t get picked up at 7am from LHR. I chose the QR/LGW option.

Today, I flew. Arriving at the airport, I went to the BA counter first (durrr), who informed me that it was a QR operated flight, so I trotted off to QR… with my 2x32kg bags (which were around 30kg each). Checking in, I get informed by the lady that the computer is telling her my bags are over-weight and I need to pay. I query this, saying that OWE gets 2x32kg, she informs me that is only on BA, I say that originally I WAS on BA, but my flight got cancelled and had to change flights. The manager comes over. I tell him the story. He tells me that the baggage limit for QR as OWE is one extra bag of 23kg, so I will have to pay 2x overweight fee. At this stage I’d been checking the websites and just confirming everything they’d been saying, and they were perfectly correct regarding the allowances etc. I do persist a little and say, that my flight only got cancelled after I’d flown outbound and that it’s kinda unfair to have been penalised like this and he says he can try and book me onto the BA DOH-LHR flight leaving at approx the same time. Obviously that is no good as I can’t get back from there. (It’s 1am UK time, so i can’t even try and arrange any transport).

So I ended up paying the 600 Riyal ~£130 penalty.

As i sat in the lounge, i was deliberating whether to bother even trying to reclaim this and how to even go about it and in the end decided that it would be a time-consuming and frustrating process and £130 wasn’t enough to spend the hours necessary to bother doing it. A cost of frequent flying and the error of judgement in picking Gatwick. End of story…. or so I thought.

As I arrive at the gate, the agent tells me to take a seat and that he needs to ring someone. I do so, not knowing what to expect. After a couple of minutes, the manager from earlier approaches me and tells me that after speaking with his superiors, and explaining everything, and he did mention my OWE status, that they will refund my charge because although technically they were correct, it just wasn’t a fair situation that I was in. Obviously i was happy with this outcome and thanked him, because quite frankly, he could have easily not bothered.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on long enough now but i thought it was interesting enough to post, and i’m interested to hear if people would have done anything differently, if anything was incorrect from QR’s side (I know I was trying my luck after checking). I also wanted to post because this was actually a positive effort by an airline and I think we should celebrate positive stories as much as shout about negative ones…

[Lady London]

This is good news @ayearinmx. It’s nice to hear there was a nice gesture made by the Qatar checkin in Doha so that you weren’t worse off after you were rerouted to fly back on them.

I sm sure it helped that, whilst querying the extra charge since it was only being involuntarily rerouted that put you in the position of being charged it, the fact that you remained polite must have helped them know that you were a nice guy in s difficult situation.

[John]

Someone who worked for a competing business booked a flight to BKK on Oman Air which allows 30kg in economy and paid for extra baggage; the purpose of the trip was to transport some heavy items.

WY cancelled and rebooked him on QR who as you now know only allow 23kg, so at check in they wanted him to pay a crazy amount for excess weight; making this payment would have made the trip uneconomical.

Since this was a competitor we just had a bit of a laugh as their misfortune and reminded ourselves not to get caught out by similar situations.

[AJA]

@ayearinmx You did the right thing by querying and then just paying the baggage fee. The baggage allowance is always determined by the operating carrier so the Qatar staff were correct.

It was a great gesture by them to refund the fee. If they hadn’t you could simply have put a claim for the expense to BA who would have paid it as the reroute was a result of the cancellation of the original BA flight.