Originally Posted by
Saltire74
I was fairly lucky to get back on the original service, but, had I not, what would have been my rights? The gate agent denied any responsibility and I can kind of see where she was coming from but after a very long 48 hours travelling and a dose of gastroenteritis, I was feeling a bit precious and there was no guarantee of getting on the next flight 2.5 hours later (next scheduled flight had been cancelled).
I have a feeling this falls into the category of being too complex and specific for anyone to be totally clear about the position, and even a few small claims judgements would not resolve it. However on balance I feel you would not be entitled to anything other than duty of care. The relevant clause is this:
Originally Posted by EC261 article 2
'denied boarding’ means a refusal to carry passengers on a flight, although they have presented themselves for boarding under the conditions laid down in Article 3(2), except where there are reasonable grounds to deny them boarding, such as reasons of health, safety or security, or inadequate travel documentation;
Note the "reasonable grounds" section. And there is also the role of HAL in this, and to simplify somewhat, BA isn't responsible for HAL's activities except when in a client-supplier relationship, which I don't think is the case here. Now there are some good arguments against this: fundamentally as a Brit in the UK brandishing a UK or even an EU passport then you've done all that is necessary to prove both your right to be in LHR and GLA and your right to travel between the two cities. However from the perspective of the boarding agent, or indeed BA more generally, s/he has "reasonable grounds" to deny you boarding given you didn't clear Ready to Fly. You would be in a stronger position if aspects of EC261 could be levied against airports rather than airlines, and the European Parliament did mull this over a few years back, but that didn't go anywhere.
It looks to me there were two problems. Tail gating, and problems with photos failing (sometimes the biometrics fail for an hour or two) do sometimes happen, and usually the HAL security officer is happy to clear people so long as the UK passport is available. LGW likewise. So I wonder whether there was another problem that prevented you from being onloaded - and that would be a BA issue. From the text above it's not entirely clear whether this came into play, in other words if HAL said that you were OK to travel but BA couldn't fix it for you. Luckily this all academic.