i think they talked nonsense to be honest. And your status does not make a difference though might put you higher up the list for a goodwill gesture but certainly no guarantee. The official situation is that if you miss your lhr-hel you are just losing your ticket and will need to buy a brand new one if you want the next flight. Anything beyond that will be a bonus.

Thanks for the update and I’m glad you’ll get to your final destination (unless there is any further disruption!)

Sorry to hear IB didn’t help. I’m not that surprised really but understand your disappointment.

Safe travels to HEL!

Did you buy a return TAP ticket or just a one-way?

I understand the OP’s frustration - and I actually share it. What the OP experienced is symptomatic of the dumbing down of the industry. When one makes a booking with a LCC, then to my mind you kind of know you’re on your own when things go wrong.

Here, the OP is a top tier oneworld frequent flier, booking on two legacy carriers, both members of OW. One OW carrier was delayed, causing the OP to miss their other OW flight. In those circumstances, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think booking OW would help. OP may have read, or have been thinking of, the beginning of the below thread for the position a few years ago

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onew...e-tickets.html
[edited to add: having skimmed through the thread, it isn’t clear to me that this is no longer OW policy]

Unfortunately, these days, legacy carriers have adapted their business practices to streamline processes, remove complexity, all to cut costs and make them more competitive with LCCs. In simple terms, this has meant a dumbing down of customer service. Same as densification, redundancies, no more complimentary food / drink, and so on.

We’ve all played our part in it by booking flights based primarily on price. It has become self-fulfilling, since in economy now there isn’t a huge amount to distinguish a legacy carrier from a LCC.

So, I think the OP is entitled to feel let down by the process. Yes, they got what they were ‘entitled’ to, and to some, it seems that as long as one gets their legal rights then they are perfectly happy. However, there are also warm & fuzzy concepts of ‘loyalty’ and the belief that by booking a legacy carrier this is going to provide more backup / support / service / care when things go wrong. The OP had that dashed last night and I can see where they are coming from. My instinctive emotional response is ‘what is the point of an airline alliance if they don’t provide a seamless service’? The rational answer is there were two contracts, OP booked to London & then missed their separate ticket to Helsinki, tough luck. But when one OW member causes that to happen, it would be lovely if the OP could have been looked after better, especially as a OW FF. Sadly, it’s 2019 and the answer is tough luck, we need to show Willie the money and Ryanair / easyjet wouldn’t do it so with prices as they are today if this were policy we’d be seeing OW airlines going bust.

Well, if I read the threads posted by the OP correctly, BA Customer Services advised the OP that he would be OK. It was the combined wisdom of FTers that he would not be OK. Subsequently, the OP and colleague off-loaded themselves from the MAD-LHR flight and made alternative arrangements. The upshot of all that is we don’t know for sure how BA/AY would have managed the situation.

In any case, the OP and colleague needed to be in HEL at a certain time, and starting from MAD, a TP flight, presumably via LIS, was the only solution.

Doc Copper

I completely agree. As I said upthread I think based on the AY flight in fact going out 55 mins late, the OP may well have made it. But when you have to be somewhere you sometimes have to take control of the situation & realistically if the OP had misconnected, I don’t *think* they’d have got to HEL that night in any event.

It's not wise to take the last flights of the night if one must be at the destination for an important business meeting the next morning.....and employers shouldn't try to play cheap on tickets in such circumstances, although the employer might have decided to "self insure" and pay sometimes for tickets that are thrown away as in this case in order to save lots of money on many of these risky "self connections" across separate tickets when they do work out.

OTOH, if MAD runway constructions is causing delays, switching to TAP and connecting through LIS might make the problem worse rather than better in that delays in these situations tend to get worse as the day goes on, so the OP rebooking to take a later flight to LIS (scheduled for a later departure than the IB operated MAD-LHR) and then doing a connection at LIS to a TAP flight LIS-HEL with no *A status doesn't seem like a proactive improvement to me. Yeah, TAP will rebook the LIS-HEL segment if the connection is missed as presumably it's all on one ticket, but this doesn't help the OP to get to HEL in time for that early morning meeting. In fact, I suspect that there's an earlier LHR-HEL flight than LIS-HEL if the outcome is that OP is stranded somewhere along the way.