prjohnsonnn

Concerns BA flouting consumer trading laws....or at least very sharp practise!
Booked prem economy with BA
Contacted them on phone to change date of flight and downgrade to economy as they said there were economy seats available on new date. Agreed with them, they quoted the price and said a refund of approx Ł400 was due but Ł 100 change fee...that was fine and we agreed. They issued new confirmation code within a few hours and we were confirmed on the flight. We rang two weeks later to chase the refund as it hadnt come through. BA said they were ' processing the paperwork'.
Rang again the day before the flight was due to leave to again chase for refund. BA said sorry, but not to worry as we had always been confirmed on the flight...and that they would go away now and 'do the paperwork'

BA then returned to the phone to then say that sorry but their policy on this flight was that the flight would have to be 'technically booked' today as the paperwork was being done now.... and as it was the day before the flight left they would require us to pay a Ł500 INCREASE as the flight had gone up in the weeks since we originally were confirmed on th flight. We were flabbergasted and complained,,,,,she said she had no authority to waive this and if we wanted to fly the next day we would HAVE to pay.

Anyway lots of letters of complaint to BA's standardisied process online, lots of replies from the complaints auto response email saying they would look into it etc etc etc ....nothing received of substance so we chased a month or so back...spoke to the Indian based complaints dept handling it and she said sorry but they were looking into it. We wrote yet again 6 weeks ago with a Letter Before Action saying they have 14 days to correct this 'overcharging' and fefund us.... nothing received yet again so last week issued a MCOL Small Claims court for the Ł400 or so that we are owed. Case due next week....

You may be interested to know that this is on the London / Bermuda flight where BA have a 100% monopoly and as a family we worked and lived there for 5 years and have dug around there with people we know who fly this route regularly .... and BA have been doing this we think for about a year on this flight.... we have other stories from people we know there who have been bounced from their business seats (overbooked flight) at the gate in Bermuda when they had booked months in advance , been downgraded to economy and then told at the airport that they have to pay a SURCHARGE to fly as the 'cost of the seat is assesed right there and then !!

We are aiming to get this into the court now so that we can establish some kind of precedent and flush out where else BA are doing this.... for instance they dont do it we think on the very competitive New York route... but they do where they have a monopolistic position maybe?

Thoughts anyone?

NewbieRunner

Welcome to FT, prjohnsonnn, and sorry to hear about your problem.

I am moving the thread to the BA forum.

NewbieRunner
Co-moderator, CommunityBuzz

Flexible preferences

Welcome to the BAEC FT forum prjohnsonnn. Well done for taking your claim to MCOL. I'm curious, what defence did BA make in their particulars and what did they say in their witness statements? Also, did you request any documentation from them, for instance recordings of your phone calls?

Calchas

Welcome to FlyerTalk prjohnsonnn.

It sounds like someone at BA did not process the change properly on the date you made it, but the story is certainly an odd one. Is there any detail you may have missed out in your post here?

If the story is as you say it, I suspect that BA will offer to settle shortly before the case is heard.

If you paid by a UK-issued credit card, your card issuer is equally liable to you for BA's contractual failure, so you can also complain to them (or sue them if necessary). The advantage for you there is they may bring considerable commercial pressure onto BA to solve the problem.

corporate-wage-slave

And I will also add my welcome to you prjohnsonnn, welcome to the BA forum, please make good use of this useful resource, and you may want to have a look at the Forum's Dashboard. One the threads there has a possibly tangential bearing on your situation, the thread for EC261.

Now firstly, this is nothing to do with BDA / Bermuda. I know a lot of people on the island have all sorts of strange theories about BA, most are untrue, and in this particular case I suspect it would have been same whether London to Manchester or London to Sydney.

Having said that, and having read many posts here of BA's long litany of screw-ups (as you would expect with any large airline), I don't recall any case exactly like this. The way it looks to me:
- you were reserved and then ticketed
- you then changed the booking and needed to be reticketed
- somehow the reticketing got lost (this - incidentally - is very common)
- then BA, with limited time, asked for reticketing on a different basis that involved the Ł500 extra (unprecedented, for me at least).

This is strange because once ticketing is in the priority queue it tends to move very quickly, using the information already in the queue. I guess one scenario is that they didn't actually submit it to ticketing at all, therefore the historical fare data was available. In other words their only option was to sell you a newly calculated fare. BA records all telephone calls and therefore it won't be difficult to verify whether you confirmed your acceptance of the original economy reticketing and cost.

I also think you may have a claim for involuntary denied boarding, though that is more complex due to the ticket status, but the thread I mentioned above gives some background on this. In essence the Regulations require you to be ticketed to claim IDB, you would need to convince a judge that you were, and it was BA who made the error, not you.

Now it isn't clear from your message if you have heard anything from BA yet. Normally the legal folk pick up claims quite quickly. If they immediately realise there has been a mistake then they will pay the claim and ask you to confirm that you have stopped the claim. It normally takes 4 to 6 working days for this to happen. It may be that this is more complex so it takes a little longer, but if BA submit a defence then this will be more complex than the information in your post suggests, since BA are actually fairly adverse to taking things further on the whole. There are some exceptions (downgrade caculations) but not many.

There is generally a non disclosure agreement that comes with this, so we won't be very surprised if we don't hear much more from you! But by all means PM me a hint or two....

Anonba

It sounds to me as though the agent forgot to actually save the new flight in the booking potentially.

Even if something hadnt been placed on a queue (and not reissued) in error but the new flight was added to the pnr, along with notes about the change and the price, then ticketing can be done on the day of departure by eticket in manchester or an airport. They wouldnt reasses the price etc as they would simply check the notes and that the fare quote was valid on the day change was made.

It still seems weird that if the error was on the part of the agent that the additional wasnt just covered by BA!


***edit***** .......looking back at the first post i think the agent may have misquoted the change. Unless you had a fully flexible WTP ticket then if you downgraded to WT you wouldnt get any fare refund but only the difference in taxes and carrier imposed sucharge. I doubt this would be as high as Ł400 in terms of a refund. Its highly possible that ticketing realised this and tried to collect the correct amount. However if it was agent error again comes to back my earlier point.

FlyerTalker7654

As this is over a refund, would it have not been easier to dispute the charge with the credit card company and let them sort it out?

Dave Noble

You won't set any precedent nor flush out anywhere else this has happened

Did you actually travel and did you pay the extra? did you travel in originally booked cabin or in economy?

Calchas

Would it? MCOL is ten minutes work.

Flexible preferences

Exactly. I would choose this route every time. And receiving the official court documentation really concentrates their minds, and they have a strict deadline to respond or lose by default (14 days I think).

FlyerTalker7654

Fair enough....guess it shows you are serious and wont be messed about.

mentor of monty

The refund amount sounds too big to me- is something missing? Did the agent misquote an additional fee as a refund?

Calchas

I was a little terse in my reply, sorry about that. Of course one should not take legal action if there's an easier alternative. But it's also the case that the credit card company might not want to help you so easily. After all, they don't know if you're lying or simply wrong, this is a slightly complicated he said/she said until the CC company has the evidence. It can take time for the complaint to move through the system. And the dispute is really with BA's internal pricing procedures, not some artefact of the card company's payment process. So in this case, I too would have gone down the MCOL route if a couple of polite but firm letters did not get anywhere

Dave Noble

I would suggest that this is a tricky one to take up with a card company. The customer made a purchase which was agreed to ; the customer then wanted to make a change to the purchase and it is the cost of this which is disputed - not whether the amount the airline wants to charge is correct

tony flynn

Same here. MCOL is a marvellous service that I've taken advantage of several times, it's about making it easier for a company to do the right thing rather than the wrong one.