Flight missed due to immigration queues – any advice?

[Hace79]

Hi,

I am planning to write a letter of complaint to BA and am hoping for some advice – is there a best route of action or have I got no hope? For context I’m a frequent flyer and gold BA member, due to work travel. Apologies for the long mail, but there is a bit of story here.

Last week I travelled with my young family and elderly mother to Lisbon for a halfterm holiday. Flights booked with BA on avois points. Outbound was nicely uneventful, however we missed the return flight.

We arrived at the airport 2 hours before flight time, checked in our luggage and headed to the gate (stopping 5 mins to use the bathroom). Due to very long queues at security/passport control we arrived at the gate 18 mins before takeoff. I was informed that the gate was closed (20 mins before takeoff), my tickets had been cancelled and they were being reissued to stand by passenger – who we could see going through the gate (our luggage had not been loaded on to the flight). This was despite going through priority lines in the queue as we have a 3 year old. While queueing I spoke to staff to see if we could go through quicker, but was told everyone is late for their flight. There were multiple people/families who had experienced the same situation.

Speaking to the staff at the gate, I was told there are no BA staff at the airport and I need to phone customer services. I called the numbers provided and the gold customer service line several times and was told there was nothing they could do and I would need to purchase a cash flight myself. Options were very limited, and the tickets were very expensive due to it being half term, but I needed to get the family home so booked the next available flight (flights the next day weren’t significantly cheaper, neither were flights with other airlines). Speaking to other families some had managed to get their tickets (on the same flight as us) reissued free of charge.

I am hoping BA will reimburse me for the cost of the flights. It was a significant amount of money and not something we can really afford. I do feel like if it was BA staff at the airport it would have been a different experience.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[NorthernLass]

This must have been very frustrating, but I can’t see how having BA staff there would have helped with the security/immigration queues. Issues with queues are a matter for LIS and their procedures, and I imagine it’s not easy to pursue a complaint against an airport/security/immigration department.

However, if other families were getting tickets issued free of charge, then you got a very poor response from the gold line and may well have some success going back to them and pressing your case for reimbursement.

The obvious answer is to arrive well before the 2 hours at peak periods, although the problem with that is that many airports don’t let you check in your bags until 2 hours before departure (this annoyed me intensely at AGP earlier this year as the people at the back of the check in queue were going to potentially face the same issue that you did).

Have you looked into whether your insurance would cover the cost of the new flights? There are usually various sets of circumstances where they will cover you for missed departure.

*As an aside, the 2-hour rule at busy times is ridiculous!

[JDB]

@Hace79 – poor you, what a nightmare. It is possible that because of your status BA will be generous, but their standard response is to say that it’s your responsibility to get to the gate on time even in these circumstances. Those with sharp elbow get greater priority than any priority lane…

It has become relatively uncommon for European airlines to have their own staff at outstations although they may sometimes wear an airline’s uniform.

If you were to make an insurance claim, I think the insurers will require evidence of the timings, queues etc.

@NorthernLass – the two hour limit is for your benefit! Most airports won’t have any dedicated baggage area ready for your flight prior to that so it would go into a general bag store and might or might not get extracted. This issue would be even worse at the busiest times. Also many airports don’t have sufficient desks or agency staff to open earlier. Those staff work for lots of airlines and are contracted around the hours of flights.

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

IF BA do anything (and I’m not saying they will even do that) it will be to refund you for the flight with them you didn’t take – and to be honest it won’t be a lot.

I don’t see them refunding the cost of the other flights you bought.

[runnerbean]

That’s an unpleasant experience @Hace79.

I can’t add information to help in this instance, but we also had extremely close shaves at Florence airport last spring, where the immigration was very close to the lounge but the queues were c.40-45mins to get through and the staff on the desks were very very slowly looking at each page of passports for both the EU and non EU queues. We ran through the gates.

Similar experience at Vienna a couple of weeks ago. The BA staff on the desks said allow 15 mins to get through immigration, the lounge staff said 20 mins would be ample. In the end we were there 40-45 mins before the flight left and were faced with huge queues and were among the last handful of people to get through the gate.

Have we been foolish or lucky in the past, or is it an issue at specific airports?

[QwertyKnowsBest]

Sorry to hear. Same issue at OSL last week, I just made boarding others didn’t. Circa 50 minutes, in not very long Q when joined, grew quickly afterwards. Schenghen passengers given priority, 2 officers taking an age with each passenger, sometimes the Q did not move for 4/5 minutes. Boarding gate agent said happens every day. Brexit, the gift that continues to give!

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

Er UK has always had to do passport control as we were never in Schengen

[NorthernLass]

@JDB, but there’s clearly a disconnect between the baggage rule and the queues at peak times. It’s very rare that we check bags in on short haul but I had bought supplies of olive oil and other Spanish delicacies on that occasion! Fortunately as we’d arrived early we were at the front of the queue when bag drop opened but it was just after Feb half term and I had read that people had been missing flights in the previous days (so arrived early, to be told bag drop not open, doh…)

Incidentally, I’ve been to several EU countries this year and only at AGP was there a significant exit queue for non-Schengen/non-EU passports. At one airport as least it was just one queue, with 2/3 agents checking all the passports.

[Olly]

You have my sympathy @HACE79 – the same thing very nearly happened to us yesterday at AMS.
We were re-booked via there on a flight back from Dubai as our original flight was cancelled. The booking was with Emirates and BA (no interlining) which meant we had to clear immigration, collect and re-check the bags and then go back through passport control. The first 3 stages had no delays, but it then took over 45 mins to get through the border. Which meant we had to sprint with the kids across the massive terminal and made it with 22 mins left to the STD. Talk about skin of the teeth.

[Alex G]

BA Flyer IHG Stayer wrote:

Er UK has always had to do passport control as we were never in Schengen

Brits have always had to go through Passport Control, but post Brexit, EU Immigration rules mean most can only spend 90 days in the EU every 180 days, and the only way for this to be checked is by physically looking at stamps in passports! It’s a mess, and it won’t be sorted out until the EU gets ETIAS and EES up and running. Both proposed systems keep getting delayed.

[NorthernLass]

EES seems to be up and running in some places. A friend reported that her aunty was made to give fingerprints and photograph on arrival at PMI a few weeks ago, and charged 24 euros pp for the privilege, though I can’t find any reference to this charge on the internet …

I’m sure the data is held electronically though, my OH definitely hasn’t been having his stay dates totted up manually!

[Rui N.]

To be honest, your OH should. There is always a risk he ends up with a grumpy border officer that starts asking questions about travel and if your OH mentions a lot of EU travel the border officer might wonder about limits and ask for proof of compliance.

[NorthernLass]

He’s nowhere near the 180 days, but if he was presumably he’d just revert to entering with his EU spouse? He’ll just have quite a few stamps from short breaks, but they’ve never spent long enough looking at his passport to check them all.

[Alex G]

According to https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees_en “Entry/Exit system is currently not in operation.”

PMI has introduced facial recognition, but I can’t find any reference to a charge for using it.

ETIAS will cost €7 if they ever get it to work.

Could your friend’s auntie have been scammed?

[NorthernLass]

That was our immediate thought – friend is going to try and get the full story out of her. It seemed to happen at immigration, however, so any scammers would either have to be government officials or extremely credible impersonators!

They were more outraged at being charged 4 euros each per day tourist tax, but there’s not really any excuse for not knowing about that!

[Hace79]

Thanks everyone for the quick response. Appreciate the kinds words and advice. I thought I was grasping as straws, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Regarding BA staff being present at the airport, I agree that it wont have enabled us to catch the flight any easier, I just thought it would make the process of rebooking easier and possibly more consistent (if one family gets reissued a flight for free).

Thanks again.

[NorthernLass]

There could have been some sort of customer service presence, come to think of it. Our flight from LYS was cancelled in August and we were directed to a help desk, French staff and not obviously linked to BA but they were re-booking people and clearly had access to BA systems. But the crew on the cancelled flight (which we’d already boarded) offered this info as we were being offloaded.

I wish I’d paid more attention to who they actually were now, but I was just concerned with getting home at the time.

Don’t forget to try your insurance if all else fails – might be worth giving them a call sooner rather than later in case there’s a time limit for informing them.

[AJA]

@Hace79 I sympathise with you and hope BA is lenient with you however Lisbon is well known for having horrendous queues at the passport control. It is also compounded by the fact that BA more often than not is a bus to the plane and the ground staff often close the gate upstairs a couple of minutes early as everybody needs to go downstairs and board a bus to the plane. The gate used is also often one of the very last on the pier so the recommendation is to not dawdle and to be at the gate no later than t-25.

[QwertyKnowsBest]

QwertyKnowsBest wrote:

CONTACT

Yes, but you miss the point @BA Flyer IHG Stayer. Never in many trips pre Brexit,have I had an immigration officer study my passport to try to count days in EU. Also never had a Spanish border official at GIB border trying hard to be officious and demanding to see a hotel booking or proof of property ownership in Spain. So yes, Brexit sucks for UK travellers in EU.

[NorthernLass]

Spain has being doing exactly that on and off for decades. It’s entirely due to their perceived claim to Gibraltar, and they are currently using Brexit as an excuse for more of the same. Just because you were lucky enough not to coincide with it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Spain has also passed its own national bill so that it can impose huge fines on overstayers and is no doubt proactively seeking out offenders as cash cows for its perennially cash-strapped government. All the while ignoring the EU dictates which don’t suit them, of course!

On the other hand, GIB isn’t being forced to remain British. They have the option of becoming an independent territory and applying to re-join the EU, so they can’t complain too much about a situation they could change if they wished.

[ChasP]

Odd that there were standby passengers already waiting at the gate and so the long queues saved BA some money if they had overbooked