Originally Posted by libove

Apologies for my delay in responding. I've been (what else?) traveling 🙄
I appreciate all the various discussion.
The answer to my specific question, which was "Does anyone here have a contact at BA to try to raise a humanitarian exception ... ?", seems to be summarized as: "No".

Twenty years ago, during my decade working for Delta Air Lines, it was a somewhat human company, and while of course the fare rules had a very few clear cases where we just would allow a customer to make a change despite their fare rule, we also did sometimes apply humanity and common sense, particularly to opportunities to fly a person earlier on a flight which otherwise would have gone out with seats in that same class empty, giving us the chance to re-sell the passenger's originally purchased later-date inventory. That's just good business.

But humanity, and even common sense, at the corporate level, seems to have been almost completely squeezed out of the airlines at this point. It's a sad state compared to what I knew back then.