Hello everyone. I am sure this will get merged with one of the master threads, but I would appreciate if the mods leave it up in the main forum for a little while since it’s time sensitive for today.

A friend of mine booked himself separate tickets from the US (MCO specifically if it matters) to LGW and LGW onto NCE. He did not realize until about 24 hours ago that he needed an ETA, obviously that is on him, but it appears from what we are reading online, the ETA system has been acting up and neither him nor his wife has been approved quite yet.

Unsurprisingly, OLCI is not working, but we are wondering whether the check-in staff recently have been strictly enforcing ETA approvals, whether they are accepting proof of ETA application without approval, or if there is any reason to believe that there might be some leniency given the current outage.

If not, is there any chance that BA will through check the bags so that they don’t need to clear UK immigration?

Otherwise, is there another clever plan anyone can suggest short of just booking a different routing, which is obviously the worst case fallback?

Thanks!