Originally Posted by
SK AAR
If the pax accepts to be rebooked to a flight albeit in a lower booking class, there is no downgrade situation. I have yet to hear of any pax that is involuntarily rebooked and if the pax prefers so it is possible to cancel/get a full refund or be rebooked to future date where F is available - often BA is even is prepared to reroute the pax to/via another F destination. BUT if the pax for convenience prefers to take the (direct) flight in a lower booking class, it has nothing to do with downgrade; the pax traveled as accepted and (re)booked and only fare diference is due.
The actual Regulation wording talks in terms of the airline "placing" someone ina lower cabin. If there no higher cabin available then the passenger hasn't got a choice other than not to fly. So the sequence of events is fairly important, but if BA says "do you accept this change from First to CW" then on three grounds this does not get them out of EC261/Mennens. The first ground is that this is the airline's set of action - it's not as though BA doesn't have aircraft with First, it's BA's choice not to run them. Secondly there is a separate provision in the Regulation which prohbits an airline from making passengers sign away their EC261 entitlements. Finally - and this is my personal view as someone who is not a lawyer - the Consumer Rights Act militates against unbalanced contactural rights. So here BA is not allowing a full refund[*] and is also narrowing down the options open to the consumer. Clearly if the customer takes advantage of the situation to rebook something completely different then that's a different matter, so if a solution involves accepting CW but switching flights or dropping a connecting sector then BA have a much stronger, perhaps overwhelming, argument.
[*] I can see a lot of the recent queries related to First to CW using Avios in some form - from a process point of view people need to know this is going to continue to happen, "maybe bookings" applies here too. But if it is an Avios booking BA have an easy way out if they were to offer a full refund of the measly redeposit fee rather than an FTV, they would save themselves a lot of hassle and strengthen their arguments. Pre-pandemic BA were absolutely fine to offer a full refund because they knew that the seats would be filled up anyway. They dropped this for tactical / financial / policy reasons so that gives the customer stronger arguments now.