It’s the holidays so I have some time on my hands to muse, so indulge me whilst I muse in your direction!

my question is, is it really cheaper for BA to pay for potentially 4 hotel rooms and expenses rather than transferring us, as requested to one of the two LH flights which had seats at the time we requested it which both left FRA and arrived back in london with a less than 3 hour delay to our original STA?

how much do airlines charge other airlines to re-accommodate pax? Is it just the normal punter’s price or do they do a special rate?

More background: A couple of weeks ago we were caught out by the freezing fog affecting London. Our flight from FRA to LCY was cancelled.

we were automatically rebooked to the 2 x the first flight back to city and 2 x the first flight back to LHR the following morning.

We were a party of 4 spread over 3 PNRs.

for 3 out of the 4 of us that wasn’t an issue. But we’d all, given the choice had the night in our own beds. For 1 of us it was a big deal for work reasons. He is a headteacher in a large secondary school. He asked if he, or we could be moved to LH and was told “no, that’s against company policy” by BA CS phone line.

we then booked ourselves into the HI at the airport and had dinner. As it was the hotel was only €100 per room and we only took 2 having shared all weekend - however we would have been well within our rights to have booked 4 as we’re just friends, not related and BA weren’t to know we weren’t random work colleagues etc.

we then had dinner which came to €140 for two - which I confess included booze as we put it to the room and when we checked out they didn’t list it separately. As the BA rep at the airport had told us “sort yourselves out, BA don’t pay for us to help you” I was subsequently disinclined to do their admin and contact the hotel to try to split it out.

As expected, the night stopper out of LCY to FRA that night was cancelled, scuppering our replacement flight home. As I was expecting this, as soon as it happened we were on the phone to BA having been told via the app that the next available flight home was the early morning BA service to city 2 days after our original flight. This was not acceptable.

in the end BA transferred us to an early morning LH flight anyway.

So, rather than agreeing to do the most customer friendly thing when originally and transferring us to LH the same night they were on the hook for:

• the rebooking on BAx2
• the rebooking on LHx2 in the end anyway ,
• up to 4 hotel rooms for our party x up to £200
• dinner x 4
• breakfast x 4
• 2 x HEX (which frankly neither of us have charged them for if we’d ended up at LHR on the Sunday evening, as it was landing in LHR Monday morning we were both in a rush to get straight to work)

Does this still add up for BA? I can’t believe that it makes business sense not to take a step back in these circumstances and say, actually, what the customer is asking for here is actually going to be best all around, let’s just do it, rather than defaulting to “computer says no”.

I have no axe to grind as I wasn’t overly inconvenienced and BA have agreed to pay all our expenses but I also can’t believe this is in either the shareholder or customer’s interests. But I don’t run an airline.

Are airline transfers really that expensive?