Originally Posted by
jayer
The one unanswered question asked above that may still be relevant is where the bank issuing the payment card (drawing inference from above it was a charge card) was domiciled. I'm presuming a US transaction on a US issuer, which makes it all the more surprising what happened. But if a Nigerian bank or third country bank it all gets a lot more complex.
I'm actually not sure it does. The OP can demonstrate (in fact, did demonstrate) that funds had left their account. BA have at no point said they haven't received cleared funds for the ticket. In fact, if that were the case, the situation would have been easy to resolve by BA saying that the OP could pay the original quoted price then and there and they'd refund the original transaction and he could fly. I believe this is standard when tickets aren't issued because cleared funds haven't been received.
Additionally, I think one has a reasonable expectation that airlines such as BA are used to dealing with cards issued by financial institutions all over the world and it's not clear to me why the issuing bank should be of consequence here.