Our daughter and son in law recently travelled to the USA, returning tonight.

Our son in law has a Gold card from BA, as a result of my GGL status.

They were booked in Economy for all 4 legs: TLV-LHR, LHR-JFK (with BA) JFK-MAD, MAD-TLV (with IB). Ticket purchased on ba.com. When WT+ opened up on their flight from LHR-JFK I used Avios to upgrade them to WT+.

Ever since that upgrade was done, they were told on MMB that they were now entitled to 3 bags of 23kg each. I can see the general idea (even though I think there was a mistake made). BA gives anyone on the same booking as a gold card an extra bag. WT+ get you 2 bags of 23kg, so they both got 3. That would be for the LHR-JFK leg only, but when you have a mixed itinerary the rule is that the longest leg is the one that matters. Only that as far as I can tell the JFK-MAD leg (on Iberia) is the longest leg, so they should only get 2 bags each and MMB was wrong.




However, they are not seasoned travellers like I am, and actually believed what MMB told them! Shock, horror!

Here is the MMB:

No problems flying out: they had 2 bags each and BA at TLV didn't even blink. But tonight at JFK not only were they told that they couldn't take 3 bags each, but that our daughter (who is blue) can only have one bag and our son in law 2. So they wanted to charge them for 3 extra bags! Iberia were pressing to close the flight, and the queue at the BA desk was long (even for golds) so they decided to leave it and pay ($400) and write to BA later. They took down all the details, including the names of the (very unpleasant) staff involved.

So after all this saga, what (if anything) can they do?

Do BA expect unseasoned travellers, who never even dreamed of using FT, to question whether what they are told for 2 weeks by MMB is wrong?

I think is is patently clear that they were misled. Do they have any recourse with BA, given that the tickets were purchased from ba.com and that the reservation was held by BA (that's where they needed to do all the seat selection and ordering kosher meals from, not Iberia).