I went into MMB to change some seats and discovered our seats on one sector of our trip had been changed to economy.

The flight is from Sydney with a stop over in London before flying onto Helsinki. The ticket is in Business class but now all of a sudden on the Finnair operated flight ( the A350 flight that I specifically booked for) from London to Helsinki our flight is showing as economy.

It says there has been a flight time change. However I can see no evidence of this. A basic dummy booking shows there has been no flight time or aircraft change.

BA call centre is not open today locally.

Interested in any reasons this would happen? The flight is not for three months.

i think it is just being replaced by an AY A330

Should still be ok as A350 being replaced with A330. Will still have long haul config although not quite as nice !!

Hopefully it is just a bug and they can sort it out for me tomorrow.

i was very much looking forward to trying the A350 even if it is a relatively short flight. If for some reason it is a permanent downgrade it would be much easier to swallow if it was just from BA Club Europe to ET.

I called BA and the initial response was that there was a flight time change. I politely pointed out the flight seemed to remain unchanged in all aspects e.g timing, aircraft.

The next response was that there must be no seats available (which is strange in itself given we had been confirmed on the flight in business). I also noted that the flight was showing a lot of availability (Expert Flyer) and that tickets could still be purchased.

They then went away to investigate and returned to tell me that it seemed to be an error and they didn’t know why it had occurred. Happily they moved us all back to business and reissued the tickets.

I am not sure if is strange or not but the same thing happened on my parents booking, which while has similar routing to us has been ticketed separately and departs the following today. We obviously got them to fix that booking also.

So for now I am pleased things have been fixed; however I will be keeping my eye on the reservation to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Given BA was not able to give a reason it happened I have a feeling it might happen again if it is a system issue.

This is disgusting. You had to refute BA CS twice before they got to the heart of the issue. How many people would give up at the first or second hurdle? Not that you will receive anything personally, but I would love to see this escalated, this is customer service at its worst, and is simply not acceptable.

Realistically if there is an error its fully possible that the booking would look like something else has happened like a schedule change or other issue. It takes maybe a few minutes to look at the ticket,the itinerary history and the flights currently in the pnr to try and build an accurate picture of what has happened. Its not surprising they might think it was a couple of different things before finding the correct reason. Also they werent just rigidly sticking with one opinion, its like “i think it might be this” but they checked and investigated further.I dont know why its so terrible the agent didnt figure it out instantly!

If that’s how the conversation went then I fully agree, I read the OPs post as having to disagree and effectively provide evidence to contradict the CS agent twice before they found the problem, which is what I find unacceptable. I guess my interpretation is coloured by my own experiences so maybe reading too much into this!

So, I woke up this morning to an email stating the same thing happened again. Flight had been “cancelled” and we had been moved to the same flight in Economy.

I called BA (Indian contact centre) and was told that no changes had been made to the booking and we were still in Business. My mother received the same email for the same flight the next day.

BA was unable to explain why I received the email. My guess is that the downgrade is still coming and the email just went out earlier

I really don’t understand why this is happening. It is a code share with Finnair and on the A350 so that might be a factor.

I am now preparing for a potential downgrade and compensation strategy as I feel like that is what is going to happen sometime before the end of December when we take the flight.

Thanks. I did think it could be the email from last time - that is a significant interval.

Finnair site shows business class with seats assigned.

Show your credit card when you check in (even if no one asks for it) just to be safe.