Originally Posted by
craigthemif
The lesson to be learnt here is to go straight to the gate, find a BA human and say "I'm here".
If the flight is overbooked and they need your seats for somebody else, you will be told "computer says no". If not, you want to be physically at the gate well before the agent starts processing offloads / no-shows - or to give said agent enough time to get you back on the flight.
When you go to the lounge / shopping / whatever, nobody really knows where you are and people / computers will make their own assumptions.
I think that is unfair. The OP stated his was at the front of the security queue 45 minutes before departure time. He was allowed through with no hitches (ie well within any time cutoff) and it was
on entry to the lounge that they discovered they had been offloaded. It's not as though he rocked up to the gates late or with 5 minutes to spare. Even allowing for a leisurely dawdle I can't see he'd have been at the lounge under 30 minutes before departure, so why offload ?
I suspect you are correct in that he had already been offloaded due to an overbooked flight and it suited the gate staff not to budge on this.
EU261 of course but another poor experience with BA - not that this should come as a surprise to anyone.