Originally Posted by sng2023

Hi all,

My husband and I are flying long-haul Canada to London in August with our son, who at that time will be a couple weeks’ shy of 2 years old. My husband purchased our tickets and paid for his infant fare online, and then upon seeing that a seat for a child under 2 could only be purchased by telephone, rung up BA some time after making the booking to purchase the extra seat for our son.

Long story short, after going round the houses with BA on this, they are quoting us GBP2,000 just for a single economy seat for him, when we can plainly see that there are plenty of economy seats available that could be purchased online for about GBP600! We’ve spoken to supervisors, have waited for input from BA’s back office, all to be told that there’s no way around this. Apparently the cheaper price is only available for new bookings, and we can’t simply buy a new seat for our son on a new booking because an under-2 cannot be on a booking without an adult. Our current booking is also non-refundable. We do currently have the bulkhead infant seats reserved but our son is quite tall for his age and it’s really not feasible to have him in the infant bulkhead seat / on our laps for 9 hours!

Any advice as to how we can take this forward? Is it worth continuing to call to try to get different agents, or is there a UK ombudsman we can speak to? If we had known the cost for an infant seat would be over 3x the rate shown online for an adult, we obviously would have made the whole booking over the phone in the first place.

Thanks!!