Originally Posted by
Tobias-UK
And those are arguments, among others, that will be advanced by a claimant in court. IIRC BA was losing £20m a day during the lockdown, I read yesterday that IAG has lost €916m in the first 3 months of this year, and a whopping €10b since the start of the pandemic. Of course airlines have had to make tough financial decisions to help them survive, after all these are (were?) extraordinary times requiring drastic action for survival.
BA will have an uphill struggle with this, but nevertheless there is an arguable defence in law and given the serious financials involved it doesn’t surprise me they are trying to run that defence. Have no doubt, other airlines will be watching very carefully.
I'm struggling to understand what that arguable defence is more than two years into the pandemic.
The trouble for BA is that UK has never stopped people from flying. The rules imposed upon us both in the UK and elsewhere were an attempt to stop the spread of the disease and prevent the pandemic. With the benefit of hindsight we can say nowhere has done very well handling this.
Early on in the pandemic I'd agree that Covid was an extraordinary circumstance but two years on for BA to claim that it is still extraordinary is stretching credulity. Particularly since we seem to have returned to normality in most of the destinations BA currently flies to.
The airline should have control over what flights it operates, and it should have some idea of sickness levels and the resources needed to resolve that if it intends to operate the number of flights it schedules. It chooses what flights and routes it will operate. If it sells tickets for those flights it should reasonably operate them.
What BA appears to be doing is selling as many tickets as it can for many flights during the day and then closer to the date reviewing those decisions and arbritrarily cancelling multiple frequency flights and consolidating into only a few and then blaming those cancellations on the "extraordinary circumstance" of Covid.
Sean Doyle was blaming BA's woes on Heathow Airport the other week, saying that BA was hamstrung because T4 still isn't open. This seems to be yet another excuse to avoid compensating passengers for its own incompetence.
That it is struggling to do anything well and is suffering financially as a result is not unexpected.
Edit: While I sympathise with BA's financial woes I do not see the airline disappearing any time soon and therefore will still book flights with them. I reaonably expect a flight to operate as scheduled. What I do not expect is for BA to cancel that flight closer to the date and blame that decision on Covid in order to avoid its obligations to compensate me for its own incompetence.