I agree with this sentiment, but I can think of a couple of reasons why in practice it may be difficult to automatically pay out compensation. First, the airline may have to reimburse other costs as well in addition to the compensation itself (meals, hotel costs etc.) and I can see why it’s more efficient to handle everything in the same transaction once they have received the receipts; and second, as I recall, the compensation is owed to the individual passengers and not to whomever paid the ticket, so it may not be as simple as just transferring the amount to the credit card used for the booking. I would be curious to hear how other airlines handle this automatically.

That said, I think a nice gesture would be to send a proactive and automatic email after a delay, making the passengers aware that compensation is owed, with instructions on how to claim. I do agree that this would go a long way to mitigating any reputational damage done by the delay, and appearing as a fair and honest company.

Once again, I sense a degree of emotive language here, with over-excited talk of ‘psychological effects’ and ‘victims’ which in truth seems to bear no relevance to the core discussion. No poster has complained about having someone sat next to them, so I’m not entirely sure who would be involved in your imagined ‘group hug’.

It’s actually a lot more boring than you’re attempting to portray ! Legitimate debate has taken place as to whether a supplier (in this case, BA) should, or should not, offer some manner of compensation if it provides a service which - in its own words - “is not what you expect when you travel with us”.

You feel compensation is not appropriate ; many others think it is. Simple as that.

I’m not commenting on whether BA should or should not have removed the CE middle seat block to get more people to their destination at a busy time of the year for air travel and after disruption due to bad weather but let’s also put this into perspective - there was some heat and some storms at LHR. This type of thing happens at weekly at many major U.S. hubs during the summer and storms are not unprecedented at LHR either (including far greater disruptions from an inch or two of snow every couple years). One shouldn’t act like Thursday was a the evacuation of a Caribbean island before a hurricane or the resumption of service after travelers had been stranded for days or weeks - it was one day of disruption due to some weather. Whether it was right or not to have remove the CE block, the idea that someone who paid for J service (including the extra space - my primary reason for almost always flying J even on very short flights - not the food) isn’t going to want to be compensated for the inconvenience is a little silly. And those people shouldn’t be judged. And if someone paid 800 GBP for a J seat instead of 200 GBP for a Y seat, they have a right to be quite aggrieved at an offer of 3K Avios.

the issues were largely caused my storms, not heat. While a line of storms blocking flight routes is much less common than say in a Dallas, it’s not unprecedented either.