Thanks to all of your who have contacted me since yesterday evening UK time. I am working my way through the volume, and will aim to ring or PM you with updates, thanks for your patience. It's been nice to chat to a few of you today, and I am very, very grateful for your support and kind words.
To give an official view on some of this, the vast majority of the ones sent to me are classed as "complex" refunds in that they won't go through the front end systems of my colleagues who you speak to. Most are ones which have been previously reissued, but other reasons are where the original credit card has expired, or where for example the Avios won't auto-refund.
Normally, the team in Mumbai would process these but their office has been closed for two weeks due lockdown. A few days later, our largest call centre, in Delhi, also closed. A week later our second largest one, in CPT, also closed. I'm not looking for sympathy, simply looking to explain that we have lost around three quarters of contact centre headcount. The remaining offices in MAN/NCL/BRE/HKG are dealing with calls (fyi, UK opening hours changed today to 0800-2000 weekday and 0900-1700 weekend, due to us losing heads too due to sickness or self isolation), as well as the day to day ticket reissues, refunds, etc. Help has been secured from airport and HQ staff, all trying to work through the backlogs to assist all our customers, but of course the volume of daily inbound refunds is high. But we will get there!
One gentle reminder is that while can help with ticket refunds, Avios and GUFT/companion vouchers, I can't help with BA Hols queries or the "voucher" process put in place by BA in mid-March
Kind regards
BA refund helper