Originally Posted by
1Aturnleft
Why would you think that?
The status of the travel ticket will be in flown status (ie the beep you hear when your boarding pass is scanned on boarding the flight). OP was enroute between HKG-LHR at this point. What airline is realistically going to allow you change that out easily to DXB-LHR either by phone or online?
It's only by virtue the diversion was to a city served by BA. Freeing up a booking to fly something different than booked is a very manual process which takes time. It is possible and did happen but it takes time.
Admittedly I've never been on a diverted flight, nor have I worked for an airline, so my information is limited on the internal workings of the booking system, but it does seem that with some pax already being accommodated on alternate flights and hotels being booked that there is already information there that the flight terminated at DXB. If things are still archaic enough that it's not easy to reduce the problem to the status of (rather oxymoronic) regular irregular operations then they should be transparent enough to say exactly that.