BA not returning Avios on cancelled award booking
 

I recently cancelled an AA return domestic awards booking for 30,000 Avios at about T-30hrs and BA are refusing to return the Avios.

I received an email noting the "application for a refund" at T-30 and then at T-20 a second email saying that no Avios would be returned in line with "ticket terms and conditions". I have kept both emails.

I've called up the Silver line twice and am simply told that I cancelled within 24 hours and therefore no Avios will be returned, even though I have clear proof that this is not true. Either there is a delay on AA cancellations being registered, or possibly they were looking at UK cancellation time vs. US departure time. They didn't appear to understand the point that if I had an acknowledgement of the cancellation well before T-24 I could not have cancelled after T-24.

This seems to me to be a pretty clear cut case of BA not meeting its own terms and conditions, but because customer service is so terrible I don't know where to go from here. 30,000 is worth a few hours of my time so I can try repeatedly HUACA (I'm not sure the Indian call centre is best placed to deal with this), but if there is anything else I can try to save me some time (I've spent an hour on the phone to BA so far) then I'm all ears.

Just to check - you weren't cancelling the inbound portion of a return booking where you had already flown the outbound, no?

I would call Customer Relations around 15 hrs, BST, and discuss it with them. Make sure you are talking to Newcastle.

If not, and assuming this isn't the inbound of a return flight, should you just want a clean process and you are totally sure on the timings, give 16 days written notice and get yourself in the MCOL logic.

Having said that, if this was a manual refund it's possible that the refund is still ongoing and BA's contractors in New Delhi just haven't understood the issue. Refunds can take a very long time.

Let us know how you get on, this is the sort of thing where only about one in five of those who raise these sorts of questions actually pass on the final outcome, unfortunately.

No, but fair question.

It was both legs of a return flight as I knew I'd only need the outbound. So I cancelled the entire ticket and booked a new outbound leg. This wasn't my first rodeo :)

Or instead of MCOL, raise a credit card claim under s.75. I would put the value of the claim as the cost of buying back the avios directly on BA.com.

But the under what law a credit card company can ask money from a trader where the transaction never took place?? Credit card companies are not courts and they just can't claim money back what was never spent.
If BA is not going to pay back the miles and the OP is within the T&C only the court can force BA to return the mile. The only time any court would ask BA to pay actual money if the miles cannot returned (ie. BA closed the OP account, etc)
It can go very messy if you try to convert miles to money as one can argue over the actual value.

So OP give a call to BA, then a recorded letter, then court action if you are absolutely sure you can prove what you are saying. (I'm sure you can if you have the email, etc)

OP will have paid the taxes using a card. If it was a credit card, then under UK law if the overall value of the product is over £100, the card company is jointly liable for breach of contract - which this is.

Thus the only issue is whether they would argue the product was not actually over £100.

They absolutely can. And it's not just that they claim the money back on your behalf - they are actually liable to you directly whether or not they can claim it back from the supplier. Their liability is not limited by the cost of the product either. The product just has to have cost between £100 and £30,000 in order for s.75 liability to apply.

Obviously if EuropeanPete is not UK-based then the above will not apply, but I think there are some protections in Europe which may be similar.

I was helpfully contacted by someone from BA after this post who passed the issue internally for further research. Unfortunately, it looks like something was lost in translation.

After a week I got a note that they were asking AA for the Avios that I should have got from flying the route, so I responded as politely as I could explaining that they must have been given an incorrect summary of the issue. This was acknowledged in a follow up email.

Two weeks have passed since then and I haven't heard anything else. I thought that I'd call BA customer support for an update, but apparently the only people who can read the customer service system are only available from 6-9am PDT.

Will try to make some early morning phone calls later this week.

BA really didn't make this easy for me, but it's now been resolved.

There is a bug in the system (possibly partners only) which means that the cancellation time is taken in BST which is then compared against local time for the flight. This means that if you're in the Americas and looking to cancel a flight within 24-30 hours before takeoff you will want to double check your Avios come back as I'm assuming the bug will remain in place for the time being. It also potentially means you can cancel within 24 hours so long as your flight is in Asia, but I wouldn't rely on that one.

After a cumulative 2 hours of waiting I managed to get through to someone in customer service who bumped me back to the main Executive Club line as I shouldn't have been put through to them in the first place.

The issue hadn't been looked into at all over the last month and the agent initially went through the usual rigmarole of telling me the Avios were not due because I cancelled within 24 hours. I had lost all patience by now and gave a pretty cold response which led to her speaking to a colleague for a while who discovered the issue which meant the Avios could now be refunded.

So, a win and thank you to the BA lurker on this forum. But wow, BA couldn't have made it much more painful if they'd hit me over the head with a baseball bat.