Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk Dorel and welcome to the BA forum. It's great to see you here and I very much hope this place will be of use to you after this is painful experience is over. Apologies for not spotting your post, initial posts here sometimes get queued up and in a fast moving forum get snowed over very quickly. Anyone else who is missing out in this or the other advice threads is very welcome to give a little prod, as you have rightly done.

First point is that in these circumstances restrictions on tickets get lifted, so I wouldn't have got too concerned by that factor.

1) Yes duty of care is available, and what you have there, £190 seems reasonable. You can also claim communication expenses (e.g. hotel wifi?).

2) LHR to hotel is a no brainer, yes. Hotel to LTN is more doubtful since you didn't get BA to rebook you (since you couldn't contact them). However the limit in this area is £50 (and arguably £100 for 2 trips), which you are well below, so I would hope they wouldn't quibble that.

3) Is by far the most complex question here. Now you are almost certainly entitled to the EC261 compensation and definitely your right of care reimbursement. You are also entitled to be rebooked, but BA physically couldn't do it. So you have two choices: one is to ask your travel agent to get a refund on the original LHR-BUD leg. If that works out more than the W!zz flight then all is fine. The second is to forget about the refund on the ticket but instead to pursue BA for the W!zz rebooking cost. BA in the past has been very awkward on this point, along with many larger airlines, and so it may require some effort to obtain this. If you are based in the UK then the court system may well protect your interests, the same may or may not apply in whatever small claim protection your county offers in the USA. On the other hand BA may simply declare an extraordinary item in their accounts and just pay up. We don't know. What I think that boils down to is that if the W!zz fare was low go the TA route, you'll probably meet your costs that way. If the W!zz fare was high then consider the BA route.

4) BA, you are correct.