Does duty of care extend to the cost of obtaining a eta/visa/e-visa where there is a misconnect in a 3rd party country which requires you pay an immigration fee to enter and avail yourself of overnight accommodation which BA have advised you to arrange?
The specifics are - flight Lusaka LUN - Nairobi NBO - London LHR, single BA ticket, both flights BA marketed although the LUN-NBO flight is Kenya Airways operated. If all had gone to plan the connection would have been airside at NBO so no Kenya ETA required.
The late operation of the LUN -NBO flight resulted in a missed connection to the BA service to LHR. Rebooked onto the next available service which was the following day. BA indicated I should book a overnight hotel at NBO myself and seek reimbursement. NBO has no airside transit hotel so only option is to enter Kenya which requires at expedited transit ETA fee. This fee is directly incurred due to the missed connection and is the only way to obtain overnight accommodation.
I will add the transit visa cost to my claim to BA and see what they say but wondered if anyone had previous success or failure with claiming this sort of cost.
The phrase 'duty of care' isn't completely accurate, it is a duty to provide accommodation, food/drink, transport to/from accommodation and communications. Those are the items explicitly included in the legislation and a visa doesn't fall under any of them so I would doubt it would be legally claimable under UK261. BA may pay anyway but that would be as a matter of customer service more than anything else.
The alternative would be to bring a claim against KQ under Article 19 of the
Montreal Convention for damage caused through delays. The argument would be that their delay directly led to you having to pay for a visa. It's an argument I am sympathetic to although I cannot comment on how it would fare in Court if it came to it.
The difference between an Article 19 and UK261 claim is that the UK/EU261 'duty of care' applies regardless of the circumstances. By contrast, airlines have a defence to an Article 19 claim if "it and its servants and agents took all measures that could reasonably be required to avoid the damage or that it was impossible for it or them to take such measures." In other words, if the delay was outside of their control (e.g. weather related) then they would not be liable.