Enigma368

Pretty ridiculous situation last night where over 30 people including me were prematurely offloaded from a BA flight from LAX last night despite our incoming domestic flight landing with 55mins to connect.

We were flying from LAS-LAX with AA and connecting to BA268 to LHR. The scheduled connection time was fairly tight at about 1 hour 35minutes. Unfortunately the LAS flight was delayed and took off about an hour late. It turned out there were over 30 people on the LAS-LAX flight connecting to BA268. The crew made several inflight announcements for BA passengers to go immediately to gate 44 on landing to take bus to Tom Bradley International Terminal. The crew also requested all other passengers wait for BA passengers to exit plane first.

The LAS flight arrived at gate at about 8.50pm and the BA flight was delayed 15mins and so was not due to depart until 9.45pm. I figured this was plenty of time and was not worried - I assumed for 30+ people they would definitely hold the flight an extra 15-30mins if necessary.

However after getting off the plane we were met by AA representatives who told us that not only could we not get a bus from gate 44 but that they had already decided we were going to miss the BA flight! They handed out boarding passes for the next day's flight and food/accom vouchers. People argued with them but they just directed us to customer service.

Given we had nearly an hour, most of us decided to just follow the cabin crew's advice and go to gate 44. More arguing ensued here about whether we could take the bus which it seems is strictly speaking for Qantas passengers only. In the end different agents there gave different instructions and some us got on the bus and some of us did not.

Those of us who got on the bus made it to the gate for BA 268 at about 9.20pm with boarding still ongoing. Extremely relieved we showed our boarding passes only to be told we had been offloaded by AA and that we would not be allowed fly. This was frankly ridiculous. We had valid boarding passes and we had arrived at the gate on time. Eventually gate agents relented and let us on. Most people's seats had been given away so we had to be reallocated new seats*.

On arriving on London, I was not surprised to find that my bag had not made it and will now have to wait till tomorrow. I spoke to some other LAS passengers whose bags also did not arrive and they said that everyone who made it to the gate had been allowed on but that many people didn't make it to the gate - either they didn't try for the bus or they were not allowed on the bus. (I would guess less than 10 of the 30 people made the flight).

Really what annoys me about this whole situation is that there is no reason why we all should not have made the connection. We had easily enough time. Could AA or BA not have put a special bus on for us to connect? It seems AA made the decision very early on to bump all of us which is weird. Also our allocated seats had been given away which makes me wonder if there were a lot of standby passengers. Very poor form anyway and poor financial decision as they ended up paying for food and hotel rooms when they really didn't need to.

*Full disclosure - I eventually ended up being upgraded to CW (from Y) due to a string of lucky breaks related to seats so I definitely can't write a complaint to BA about this - but it does not change the fact that what happened in this situation was completely un-necessary.