d'Yquem

Hi all

For about the fifth time in three weeks, BA has cancelled my flight. This time it's BA164 from TLV-LHR on Monday 7 January. It has since booked me on the same flight the next day. A bit annoying, as I now need to reschedule lots of meetings on Tuesday and take an extra day's holiday (which is the most annoying bit). And I need to stay in a hotel in Israel on Monday evening. Unfortunately, George W Bush is going to be in town with an entourage of over 1,000 people, so easier said than done, and pretty expensive with it...

As I've been messed about by BA quite a lot recently, I decided to analyse all its communications to me on the subject and believe I've found a major defect in the manner in which BA communicates its compensation policy. It is possible that this might put BA in breach of the Regulation. I don't make such statements likely... here's why I think this is the case:

On cancelling a flight, BA sends an email and / or SMS. This is what I received:

Interesting. No mention of the rights under the Regulation. So I follow the link and this comes up:

Hrm. Nothing there either about my rights under the Regulation. There's a link to the FAQ. Nothing on there about it either. How odd...

So I decide to call the BAEC. I spoke to a nice chap but he wasn't terribly on the ball. Let's call him Tim-Nice-But-Dim. The first thing I did was ask TNBD why the flight had been cancelled. He put me on hold and after a few minutes came back and mumbled something about lack of crew. It's strange how they know that three days in advance, but these things do happen.

So I asked him what I do about the flight. He said he would rebook me with no extra charge. My ticket is F/A, so I was entitled to this anyway. But thanks TNBD.^ I mentioned that I didn't have a room reservation for Monday night, that I would need to book a taxi to the airport, that I would need to reschedule work meetings, that I would need to book an extra day off holiday (). This should have triggered the desired response but TNBD didn't bite. Ok, maybe I need to be more explicit. So I asked TNBD what my rights were. He said that he had no information on this, but there was a seperate department that wasn't open until 9am on Monday morning and that they might be able to help. He didn't have its direct number apparently either... When I tried to engage TNBD in conversation about the substantive topic, he said he wasn't authorised to talk to me about it. But then he offered a gem of information: even if he did know about it and was authorised to talk about it, he catagorically stated that BA couldn't organise a hotel room for me and I'd have to organise it myself and then reclaim the money. I asked him why. He said it was because the flight was more than 24 hours away, which, having finally remembered the existence of the Regulation, he was able to quote from authoritatively...

Very odd! So I asked if I could speak to his supervisor. To my amazement, the BAEC duty manager picks up the phone a good five minutes later. For some reason, she reminded me of Edwina Curry (for the avoidance of any doubt, I don't share any fetishes with a former Prime Minister... ).

I asked Edwina specifically about my rights to (i) compensation for a cancelled flight and (ii) getting BA to organise a hotel room in TLV for Monday night. She also told me that she didn't know the contents of the compensation rules. I am sure that if I hadn't in fact mentioned the words "compensation" and "Regulation", then despite the fact she's obviously been given a briefing by TNBD, Edwina wouldn't have referred to those words the entire conversation. (It seemed similar - although not nearly as offensive - to the surreal, stupid and insulting way that George W. Bush once referring to Africans as "African Americans" because his PR team had trained him never to use the word "black" in public). Now being a very helpful lawyer (), I decided to help Edwina familiarise herself with the Regulations. I even told her where on the BA website she would be able to find the compensation levels. You know, the URL which is almost impossible to find on BA's search engine and not mentioned on any of the customer communications I've been sent... I told her the compensation levels (€600 in my case), and she actually had the audacity to thank me for sharing the information with her...

We then got on to the issue of the hotel room. Even though a second ago she'd professed ignorance to the entire issue, she told me BA wasn't able to do anything about it except receive the receipts from me after the event and then decide whether or not to compensate me. I told her that this was unsatisfactory and might even be in breach of the 'right to care' part of the Regulation, which states:

To me, as a matter of legal construction, the phrase "the operating carrier will provide hotel accomodation" and "[p]assengers will be advised of the arrangements for obtaining [...] hotel accomodation" doesn't really fit very well with telling a passenger that they will need to do everything themselves and reclaim it after the event (at which time, I fully expect BA to argue the toss on hotel costs and probably tell me to claim off my insurance company!).

To me this amounts to a refusal to assist, making my only remedy to claim damages from BA (which they should agree to unless it plays silly buggers). This is very different from what is provided for in the Regulation.

In all, this was a most dissatisfactory experience. To me, it seems pretty obvious that BA has a policy designed to make it as difficult as possible for passengers to seek redress under the Regulation, including an almost total lack of communications of passengers' rights. If it wasn't for this illustrious website, I wouldn't know I was entitled to anything. This compounds the fact that BA has, on the vast majority of the times a flights has been delayed or cancelled, run out of the pieces of paper explaining passengers' statutory rights. This is appalling for a quoted company.

I'm going to take this up with the Air Transport Users Council, which is part of the Civil Aviation Authority. Has anyone got any experience with them?

Regards
/MHL