Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk GilesC, and welcome to the BA forum. It's good to see you here, welcome on board, and I very much hope we will see more from you.

Up until a year ago Customer Relations were fairly generous about giving out Avios. It was a bit of an in joke around here that if you complained and were offered (say) 5K Avios, that was to be interpreted as "we don't agree but here are 5,000 Avios, now go away". That all changed almost overnight, and now even if your First seat from SYD-LHR was inoperable, you will struggle to get 10,000 Avios for it, at least via Customer Relations. So they went from one extreme to another.

I guess there must have been some loading error since for Band 4 flights there is usually a choice of 2 main courses, as there was on the outbound, and in fact that is also the case for Band 3 flights too. So yes, something went wrong there, however I suspect CR didn't see this as a particularly serious mistake and therefore weren't that disposed to offer a gesture. And even in the good old days, I think that you may have struggled to get much recognition on that one. Mean spirited? Well I guess this was an easy route to reduce costs, rightly or wrongly.

In addition to CEDR there are other mechanisms open to you (MCOL, Section 75, Trading Standards) but I guess they do fall into the sledgehammer category too.