Originally Posted by 13901

Very sorry for your wife's ordeal, OP, but I have to side with the BA agent there.

The agent has no way to check that your wife's boarding pass was genuine and not an attempt to illegally enter South Africa and the training BA gives to its staff is that, when in doubt, don't assume. The fines for aiding illegal immigration are pretty steep - I remember that Saudi Arabia will fine $20k per passenger if somebody is checked in for Jeddah's 'normal' terminal and not the Hajj one - and countries can, and do, get to the point of blocking a route if it's getting too serious.

Many moons ago I was in the CSR's position when a gentleman arrived at flight connections in T5, coming from another airline. He had a ticket to Canada on BA, but his nationality would've required him a visa to Canada, which he didn't have. He produced a boarding pass for a flight from Toronto to Mexico, on Air Canada, and in Mexico he needn't a visa. The BA check-in system in use at the time was preventing me from checking the person in, and in order to void that inhibition (which, by the way, would've been logged under my name and staff number) I needed to 'trust' that Boarding Pass. Since the Toronto flight wasn't for a good while I asked him to take a seat in the airside corridor, scoured the info pages in the system, got hold of the duty manager for Air Canada in LHR, and got him to check the ticket number - which is not something we were advised to do, but that I did out of my own initiative - which turned out to be fake. The BP was doctored, though it looked like a proper printout.

I don't dispute your good faith, but put yourself in the shoes of the BA Representative. If the booking cannot be validated in its entirety, then it's inherently fishy. And faking a BP doesn't take too much effort; I faked one for a friend's batchelor party a while back, and he turned up at LHR totally convinced we were going for a weekend to Ust-Kamenogorsk/Öskemen in Kazakhstan!