Originally Posted by
cauchy
One theory is that Comair flight could have been full already, and the tickets you saw on BA.com could simply be flagrant overselling. But then the agent would have claimed the flight is full?
Yeah, that’s right, they never claimed it was full, they just said BA weren’t putting us on that flight. They offered to sell me tickets at the desk as well. Actually one other thing that happened that I forgot about is that BA made an announcement on the flight that they had rebooked people already from the 12:00 DUR flight to one at 16:45. I had assumed then it might be because immigration had long queues or the 14:20 had sold out, but we breezed through immigration and after a short wait for bags thought we could simply request to move onto the 14:20 flight (as cheap tickets were showing).
When I looked on the BA site they had single tickets for 700 ZAR (£35), but if you booked a pair it was around 1400 for each ticket, and I was quoted 3800 at the service desk for 2 adults + 1 infant.
There were possibly system issues due to Comair only restarting flights yesterday that stopped them moving us onto those flights - I hope that was it anyway, and it wasn’t a pricing decision at the cost of inconveniencing passengers through an additional 2.5 hour wait, and no ability to access the lounge (as booked on a different airline) - which was frustrating as we wanted to charge phones after being in WT+ on an unrefurbished 777 without USB charging (at least from what I could tell).
In hindsight we shouldn’t have accepted the itinerary we were offered originally (given a 1h:45m connection being just above the minimum recommended time), and asked for the 14:20 flight then, the assumption was that it would be a fallback, so there was nothing to lose.