It sounds like they were still suspicious at the time given their refusal to accept a credit card payment over the phone and insisting on cash payment.
I don't know what went on in BA's mind but it sounds like they had some reasons to be concerned, rightly or wrongly.
Airport people can only do a limited amount of things. I assume they can't just turn around and over-ride the system, reissue the ticket and let her fly.
Remember that the fraudulent transactions on the credit card can be clawed back even if the transactions had successfully gone through, so if the transaction had been flagged up as potentially fraudulent, BA would have indeed been very cautious with it in case they eventually have the money clawed back.
It's not a nice situation to be in and perhaps there were ways of handling this much better but it sounds like the transaction had been flagged for a while and for fraud prevention reasons they couldn't communicate things properly in advance, or that it might be a customer service failure relating to automated despatch of emails.
Last edited by LTN Phobia; Sep 10, 2012 at 11:28 am