LHR-INV cancelled 18 June 2023

[peterjgwilliams]

Please can I have some advice. Last night my BA flight 1466 at 19.15 from LHR to INV was cancelled at about 21.15 leaving my wife and me and two very elderly relatives to fend for ourselves. We haven’t yet been advised of a rebooking by BA and the LHR people were sympathetic but couldn’t rebook anything for us. Unsurprisingly there are no seats on LHR-INV flights today. We need to join a ship in Inverness this evening so we have had to buy train tickets for today. I haven’t yet rung BA (too many other issues to resolve including finding a hotel in London at midnight for us all and booking train tickets). I need to protect the return flights in a week’s time. What do I need to ask BA to do? I’m resigned to not getting the train fares paid but I would like the outward portion of the flight refunded if possible. The cancellation may well have been related to the weather so I’m not confident of EU compensation.

[SamG]

Your flights won’t be cancelled, if they added a rebooking to your booking (you could see in the app if so) then it would be in unconfirmed status and so you couldn’t “no show” it. So the remaining sectors in your booking would remain intact. However there is no harm in speaking to them to confirm this

I would then claim the train tickets as rerouting (having given them the opportunity at LHR to reroute you) and your hotel and any meals as duty of care expenses in a claim. I’d also have a go at a seperate claim for UK261, they’ve been cancelling a lot of flights due to aircraft and flight crew shortages recently.

To claim the train tickets then you can’t have a refund as well

To be fair to BA you don’t read much about them being tricky about paying out expenses in these situations so I think you’d get your money back pretty quickly and not be left out of pocket

I hope the rest of your trip proceeds smoothly!

[freckles]

If you check flight status on BA (available in the app and presumably web), it shows cancellation due to adverse weather. They were asked to cancel a proportion of flights by ATC, so unlikely to be on the hook for compensation, but duty of care still applies

[SamG]

Ah OK – in that case then they’ll deny any claim as that is fed from their internal coding, so just the expenses and rerouting to claim back

[peterjgwilliams]

Thank you all for your advice. I have not received any approach from BA to offer replacement flights (which does not matter in practice as we took the train). I have managed to contact BA and I have been told that the return flights are unaffected by the cancellation of the outward flights.

I will make claims for reimbursement and compensation when we get home. We don’t know why the flight was cancelled. It was on the departures board (delayed first by about an hour and then by over two hours) until it was cancelled, so it doesn’t appear that it was a pre-planned cancellation because of the weather.

There is one new development. Bizarrely I have received a text from “Flightclaim” saying “Your recent flight was cancelled and you may be elible for up to £540 in compensation. Start your claim here at [flightclaim.me].” Who told them that I was booked on a flight that was cancelled and gave them my mobile telephone number? The only possibility is BA but why would they have done that? It’s against their own interests surely. And so far as I am aware, I can make my claim(s) without third party help.

[SamG]

Not sure if I’ve posted about it on HfP but there is a long thread about it on Flyertalk. Essentially it appears that somewhere in a system that BA (and maybe other airlines are using) there is a leak. This data is being mined and being used to send out affiliate links to flight claim websites. The sender of the link then gets a cut of the fee the claims website takes presumably

Been an ongoing issue since last year ! I’ve spoken to BA a couple of times and they’re no further forward to resolving it seemingly, I can imagine that the downstream provider themselves isn’t aware either so it’s quite tricky to identify the issue

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

On your last point that has been raised on flyer talk BA board a few times.

Also people reporting they are getting texts for flights on other airlines as well.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive-club/2120654-who-sold-my-data-flight-delay-claims-handler.html

Worth an email to BA data protection team who are aware of it.

[AJA]

There is a long thread on FT about receiving this unsolicited text to help claim compensation. Apparently Flightclaim is a Singaporean company. Interestingly the mahjority of the reports of this happening seem to have been on inbound flights to the UK. Your experience is unusual. It is of course a breach of UK GDPR so you may wish to report it to the ICO and BA’s DPO.

Apparently BA’s DPO is aware of these texts and was investigating.

Edit: Beaten to it by BA Flyer IHG Stayer

[sloth]

I got exactly the same text from Flightclaim when my DUS to LHR was cancelled end of May. The text came 1.5 hours after the flight was cancelled and ironically before I got ANY contact from BA regarding rerouting etc. is clearly an inside job, hardly surprising with the shocking IT that BA use and their usual contempt for dealing with issues