kippax

Received a letter today from the BA audit department.

Over the last couple of years I have made a few Club World/WTP flights ex EU to take advantage of a more favourable fare and to combine it with local business meetings at the same time. For example, Mil-LHR-NYC-LHR-Mil.

Obviously living in the UK, I have not had to use the final coupon of the flight and where the coupon was non-changeable, it was obviously allowed to expire.

Extracts from the letter are as follows;

"As a very regular and frequent traveller on British Airways, you are probably familiar with many aspects of our airline. A ticket is intended for use in the same order for which it is booked. That is, sequential order from coupon 1 through to and including the last coupon. The review of your account revealed instances where the last coupons on tickets were not used.

In these instances, the highlighted were not used at all and the tickets have not, therefore, been used in the manner for which they were purchased. The fare payable for the actual travel made on these tickets would have been significantly higher than the fare paid. There are variances in costs associated to ticket usage in this way, which are due to the diversity in fare prices in countries with differing currency values.

Please be aware the following tickets need to be used by dates stated or BA miles and tier points already accrued for the flown sectors will also be lost as tickets will then become invalid."

These final coupons they are referring to were non-changeable according to the fare rules. Obviously I will contact them to see if I can re-open that coupon but I was intrigued to hear if anyone else had had a similar experience. Without getting into the legalities of EU freedom of movement etc surely it is the decision of the passenger if he/she wants/does not want to take a particular flight without having the threat of the whole ticket being made invalid? My understanding was that you had to start the journey but I have never read anywhere that you had to complete all sectors.

graraps

Their terms and conditions (and those of most every airline) state that you have to make "full and sequential use" of the coupons. It follows logically that, according to them, you have to use every coupon in the ticket for the fare to be valid. In case you don't, the T&Cs allow them to do a refare and probably bill you for an insanely priced full-fare oneway ticket (maybe something like full J MIL-LON plus full J LON-NYC-LON).
That's their T&Cs. Whether these T&Cs fall foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act (which, in my understanding of contract law, they should) is something that can be debated in court (but I don't know whether there is any case law on this).

clubman

Have they really got nothing better to do these days then send out letters like this?

I can think of a few...

astralclouds

That sounds similar in tone to the Amex TCC 'spirit of the scheme' letters. I have many instances (dozens) in the past where a non-changeable ticket was purchased, knowing full well I would not use the return sector, simply to avoid extortionate one-way fares. I have never read anywhere in any Ts&Cs of the compulsion to fly all sectors to earn TPs and miles from those sectors flown.

aristoph

Exactly. They obviously don't feel they have alienated their customers sufficiently.

astralclouds

Maybe not, but those rules certainly fall foul of the laws of the environment - forcing someone to pay more to fly fewer sectors ain't very green

kippax

The thing is in The Ultimate BA Guide posted on this site and moderated by BA, Shutte Bored says;

"Instead of paying, say, £3000 for a semi-flexible Club World ticket LHR-BKK-LHR, you can buy one for £1700+ if you start your journey in LIS instead of LHR. You simply need to buy a cheap one-way ticket to LIS first. You can also, for a fee, build in a stopover in London – so you could, for example, fly to LIS for a weekend break in August (using the first leg of your BKK ticket for the return) and then do the LHR-BKK leg in September.

The only catch is that you MUST MUST MUST start your journey in LIS! You CANNOT discard the LIS segment and just turn up for the longhaul at LHR – BA will automatically invalidate your entire trip (and don’t go crying for a refund either, this is just one of the rules!)

However, you don't need to take the final segment back to LIS if you don’t want to. If you are on a J ticket (where stopovers are chargeable) and are worried about BA wanting to check your bags all the way through to LIS and you’re coming off a longhaul flight at LHR, then book your return segment back into OPO or FAO which go from LGW instead. In these cases, the LHR/LGW transit means they CAN'T through check your bags (the same principle works particularly well for AMS too, which is served from both airports). Booking the last leg ex-LGW will make the ticket slightly cheaper as the airport service charges are slightly lower than LHR. Conversely, booking the last leg ex-LCY will make the ticket slightly more expensive. If you cannot book your last leg from the ‘other’ airport, you may want to book it for the next day (but less than 24 hours from arrival, so it is not treated as a stopover). This gives you far more leverage with BA if check-in at, say, BKK try to insist – incorrectly - that you must check your bag to your final destination.

If you are on an F ticket then a neat trick is to take advantage of the free stopovers and book your final LHR-LIS segment a long time in the future – you can then use this to get down to LIS to start your next trip!"

So it is hardly an uncommon practice amongst other flyer talk members...

Raffles

To put it mildly .... although most of us would only do it once a year. I think I've done one a year for the last 3 years.

HIDDY

Sounds very similar to a thread where the audit department deducted TP's from a member for not using some of the return portions of her CE tickets to CPH IIRC.

G-BOAC

There is nothing 'official' about this site - it is neither connected to nor moderated by BA! Various BA staff may well read/contribute (and if they have the power, act on things the rising number of stupid people can't keep quiet about *cough* BAH-DOH *cough*) but that's a different matter. The only official BA accounts on here of which I am aware are BA Executive Club and ba.com helper.

kippax

Fair enough. Fairly new to the forum and mis-read the "moderator: British Airways Exec Club forum"....

David-A

Going back on topic:

BA have go to get themselves into the same decade as their travellers (aka customers):

If someone buys a ticket to fly N segments and they then fly them (in that order) that should be enough. Preventing people nesting journeys is not simply out of date - it also forces them into the arms of competitors (for some - if not all) of their journeys.

If someone buys a ticket and then abandons the rest of their ticketed journey at a point part way through then (assuming you have collected the right taxes for payment to governments) they should be FREE to do it. BA will have made a cost saving as a result.

The only thing BA have a valid point on is preventing people starting a journey mid way through. But having said that, people should be free to begin journeys from any break of journey point (stop over), or to just fly return journeys.

The modern traveller (BA's customers) view and expect things differently. And if BA want to protect they revenue from full fare tickets by having expensive or impossible to change ticket classes - they have to allow people to replace legs with other tickets should their plans change. Otherwise they will be saying goodbye generally.

(a shareholder)

KenJohn

The letter makes a comment. Fine - that part can be binned.
Does the letter ask for a response or action from yourself.

If not, is it just a due process letter that BA (who obviously have access staff doing bean counting rather than carrying luggage in T5) in response to some internal audit point that they have. Suspect BA is looking for financial clean up points internally if their profits are suffering from the high fuel costs.

What they forget is that by trying to get that last euro/pound from its pax, it is in danger of all the pax switching to a different airline loosing the total revenue from the pax. AF have the same set up where ex-London fares are half the price of ex-France fares. Same, if not an easier exercise to fly via CDG if BA is sufficiently annoying.

knifeandfork

Dear Lord.

Has this happened before? Is this the death knell of ex-EU? First, BAH-DOH-BAH and then this?

HIDDY

Yep, they're weeding out the chancers - next?............The Eurocheats!!

It's all gone pearshaped since Lyndsay left.