Greetings from a long-time lurker. With apologies for this story being a little stale, I thought it would be of interest to the folks here. This is not intended to be a rant but more a tale about a situation that I think (from my various interactions with BA concerning it) is pretty unusual. Hopefully it will also serve as a warning to others.

I was booked in F (using Avios) LHR-HKG on 13 August. I was aware of a Typhoon in HK but the flight appeared to be operating normally. Got to F checkin at T5 to be told "haven't you heard about the typhoon, the flight [due to depart at 1830] won't be leaving until midday tomorrow". I was desperate to get to HK as soon as possible as I only had 2 days there before the next leg of my trip, so I asked if there were any workarounds. The agent was extremely proactive and, whilst warning me that the HKG flights might all get cancelled/heavily delayed, gave me various options she was prepared to rebook me on, including VS, CX, LH, KL etc etc.

The best option seemed to be LH, connecting in FRA, which was still operating that evening. She rebooked me onto that very quickly. She mentioned in passing that "sometimes other airlines have problems accepting rebooked passengers on miles tickets" but that the only way I could work out whether LH would accept me was to head over to T1 and check in.

So, off I go to T1. Spoke briefly to someone at the LH ticket desk and then the F check in desk. LH welcomed me with open arms, checked me straight through to HKG and advised that their flight wasn't going to depart until 0700 the next day (I was OK with this as it still got me into HKG 5 hours before the BA flight), but that he could see a room at the FRA Sheraton was reserved for me and I'd be met off the LHR-FRA flight with a voucher for that.

Got to FRA no problem. Agent on the jetway advised me to get landside and go to F ticket counter to pick up the voucher. It was there that the problems started. The agent (who, as an aside, lacked any sympathy or even courtesy throughout the whole encounter) started tapping away and puzzling over my FRA-HKG boarding pass. I'm now going to summarise what happened as I was with him for nearly 1.5 hours - the upshot was that he (in an unnecessarily theatrical manner) ripped up my BP, and told me that my ticket was "invalid". The only way I was getting to HKG was if I paid EUR8,000 there and then.

I never fully understood what the problem was but he kept saying to me that the ticket was a "zero fare" ticket, that I hadn't paid for it and that BA hadn't paid LH for it. He said BA should never have rebooked me. Despite asking several times and in several ways, he could offer no explanation of how LH at LHR T1 allowed me to travel to Frankfurt on an invalid ticket, and checked me in right through to HKG. He phoned BA ticketing at LHR twice during the interaction (or at least claimed to do so - he was out of earshot for those calls) and fed back to me, with a self-satisfied smile, that I had "clearly been warned by BA that my ticket may not be accepted". BA at FRA was shut for the night by this point, as was BA customer service in the UK. Apparently BA told him to tell me I should either pay the money for a new ticket and then "sort it out later with customer service" (as if!) or I should do nothing and phone BA in the morning. When I asked what I should do now he said "you can do whatever you want but you are not a Lufthansa passenger and I cannot help you". That obviously included the hotel room, which they were no longer offering me.

Realising as I did that (a) I was not going to get anywhere with LH and (b) I was going to have to spend the night at FRA, I went to the Sheraton and got a room. Whilst in there, I tried BA customer service in the US. I was on the phone for nearly an hour with a really helpful agent who recognised that "someone had screwed up here" and wanted to fix it, but couldn't. What I wanted to do was to get back to LHR in time for my original flight which was still due to leave at midday. That wasn't possible as he was unable to get me back on the flight on which I had previously been offloaded when rebooked onto LH.

After 2 hours' sleep I got to the ticket desk at FRA (after taking the train to the other terminal) and yet another excellent and helpful agent, who was horrified at the whole situation and couldn't understand what LH were playing at, booked me onto the first flight back to LHR. However, she couldn't get me back on my original flight because she said that in the system it was "in the past" (even though it actually hadn't left yet due to the delay) and she couldn't work out how to make a booking that the system was telling her had already left. So I was booked on a flight leaving at 1830 that evening - not a disaster but I wanted to get on my original flight to avoid having a 10 hour wait.

I got to T5, queued up again at flight connections and explained everything to the agent. He, like the other agents, couldn't understand what had happened and struggled to be able to get me onto the flight leaving at midday. After 30 minutes of phone calls and tapping away, he managed to do it although he said that "there's no one to authorise me to do this, I'm just going to do it and hopefully it will work". I then went through arrivals, picked up my bag, dropped it off again in departures and headed to the CCR. I spoke to the lounge dragon who said "you better speak to the duty manager about this". The duty manager then appeared and was fantastic. She sat with me for half an hour and heard the whole story. She promised to pass on the details to customer service who would contact LH to see what had happened.

I was then emailed by customer service and (after a lot of phone tag) spoke to them. The money I spent on the hotel was put straight into my bank account, no questions asked, but there was no explanation forthcoming or feedback on what had been discussed between LH and BA. There was no other "compensation" offered (nor did I request any).

I would be really interested in any views people have on the above, whether it's happened before, and anything I could have done differently.

Thanks for reading.