Hi everyone. I return with good news!

I wanted to wait until it was certain and we were actually paid, but we have agreed an out of court settlement with BA of about £2000, which works out at about a couple of hundred more than we spent in total to get home, plus covers the cost of the return portion of the tickets (which we thought we'd lost). To say we're relieved is an understatement!

We had a few interesting revelations between my last post on this thread and now, including:

• On further inspection of BA's defence, they had got the situation completely wrong. For some reason, they thought we flew to Miami (where our layover was supposed to be), despite the fact we had stated numerous times that we were denied boarding on the flight from San Jose to Miami. We checked everything we had sent and nowhere had we made it sound like we made it to Miami, so I'm unsure why they think this.
• The information from our Data Access Request came back, and with this we received an automated report about our booking. It appears that their system sent several automated messages to BA staff stating that our tickets needed to be issued (one every day for three days before the flight, and one in the early hours of the morning with an urgent three hour deadline). None of these messages were ever addressed by a human, and we were obviously never issued with our tickets. So we have solid evidence against BA here.

We never relayed any of this to BA.

BA contacted us a few days after we had sent our completed Directions Questionnaire to the court, offering us money for the replacement tickets and EC261 (about £1900 in total). We responded asking if court fees were included, and they came back about 10 days later saying they could include these as well. So we accepted, and have now been paid about £2000. We are very glad we don't have to go to court!

I just want to say a MASSIVE thank you to everyone on this thread who has helped me. I am so grateful to have found this forum, and genuinely believe that we would never have got our money back if it wasn't for the amazing advice and support from you all on here. So thank you, so so much!

I'm happy to answer any questions about this case, or if anyone stumbles across this thread in the future after finding themselves in a similar situation, please feel free to send me a message and I can try to help

Edit: In my excitement, I forgot to include in my calculations/summary here that a few weeks before we received our offer from BA we also received an automatic (?) refund for the unused portion of our return tickets, which was about £350 out of the total £800 we'd spent on them. We did disclose this to the courts (BA cc'd in) as we'd never asked for this and were worried this could be used against us. So when BA did make us a second offer, they deducted this cost from the replacement flight ticket. But what this means is that our payout was slightly higher than I've mentioned above, about £2400. So we actually received a few hundred extra for our stress and troubles, which is nice!