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Covid-19 BA Rebooking/Cancellation/Refund HELP & ADVICE *No Speculation etc*

Old Mar 14, 20, 4:58 pm
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Last edit by: corporate-wage-slave
BA Covid-19 Rebooking / Cancellation / Refund Help & Advice

If your flight is cancelled by BA:
Commercial booking: Your options are: cash refund OR Future Travel Voucher (FTV) OR rebooking OR Avios credit
Redemption booking: Your options are: full refund of cash and Avios OR FTV OR rebooking.
BA Holidays booking: You should be given a refund pro-actively.

If your flight is cancelled by BA - any flight in the PNR - you can get a full refund so long as you booked directly with BA. You can only get a refund by telephoning BA. Refunds are taking between a few hours to a few weeks to be repaid, depending on the sort of booking made. If you don't wish to travel you can opt for an FTV or eVoucher valid for travel until 30 April 2022, though flights more than 355 days away are not currently bookable - flights are enabled at 355 days before departure. Vouchers such as 2-4-1 are also thereby extended. You can do this even if the flight is operating. The best advice we can give is to delay opting for an eVoucher options until the last moment, since if BA cancel your flight you have more options. BA have also adjusted the Standard Customer Guidelines so that if BA cancel the flight you can be rebooked to anytime in 12 months after you originally bought the ticket, so long as there is space in the cabin - there is no need to have a fare bucket available or Avios availability. If you choose the Avios credit you will get between 108 to 126 Avios per GBP of your fare. Note older posts in this thread may now be inaccuarate since the current policy has been amended several times.
===
If your flight is not cancelled but you don't wish to travel
Commercial booking: If you are eligible for Buy with Confidence, you can have an FTV valid until April 2022. Rebooking may lead to a fare recalculation but no change fee.
Redemption booking: Your can do the normal Avios refund, with the redeposit fee capped at GBP 35 per person. Alternatively for the same fee you can rebook to new dates subject to availability. Alternatively you can have an FTV.
BA Holidays booking: You may be get a refund proactively, otherwise you are looking at an FTV for at least the flight component of your trip, maybe for all components.

If all of the flights in your booking are still scheduled and you don't wish to travel then you best wait until a few days before departure in case there is a cancellation. As you can see above, a cancellation gives you better options. You are in scope with Buy with Confidence if you are flying between now and completing travel before 31 August 2021, also if you bought your ticket after 3 March and due to complete all flights before September 2021. The BA web page on this is:
ba.com/confidence
===
Below are some of the options / workarounds being suggested in order to obtain a refund as opposed to a Future Travel Voucher, but they probably no longer work:

Refund of Cancelled Flights:
  • Call BA (no longer a requirement to be travelling in the next 72 hours, you may need to make repeated calls to get through). Telephone numbers are in this thread, but you can also find them on BA.com at the bottom left of the website, under Help and Contacts.

Paid Seating Refund:
Bookings made using Lloyds Upgrade Voucher
You should expect to receive:
  • Full refund of Avios and money paid
  • A new voucher issued, which has validity for 6 months (from the date of issue, i.e. when you request the 'refund')

Lloyds Upgrade Voucher Notes
  • Flights can be used within 12 months, so it will be good for travel up until the end 6 months plus 12 months if you book just before the new expiry
  • It's been advised to take the voucher instead of rebooking as it gives me more flexibility.
  • The original expiry date of the voucher was irrelevant because the booking was cancelled.
  • You must book within 6 months of the voucher being issued and the ticket has 12 months validity so you can change flights after, provided the new flights are within the 12 month window.
  • You won't receive any email, only the refund and the miles.
How to find out the status of your voucher and the amount it contains Future Travel Vouchers versus eVouchers
  • See posts 3052 and 3151 to understand the difference. FTVs cannot be used online (and are not really vouchers), whereas eVouchers, issued for simple bookings, can be used online.
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Covid-19 BA Rebooking/Cancellation/Refund HELP & ADVICE *No Speculation etc*

Old May 17, 20, 6:40 am
  #2296  
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: London
Programs: BAEC Gold, Accor Live Limitless Gold, Hilton Honours Gold, Avis Preferred Plus
Posts: 1,806
Originally Posted by Safifi
I just tried calling BA again but after some wait I'm getting a recorded message to say that due to the covid29 situation they have had to reduce their working hours, and are thereby only available at shortened working hours Monday to Friday! I do not have a Skype account to call the number in the UK.

As the departing flight LHR-BOS is scheduled for tomorrow Monday 18/5, is it at all possible to cancel my booking online today and deal with this issue at least? I am quite busy on a Monday with the start of the week.

Thanks for your help.
Which number are you calling as it seems to me that the US Gold line should be working:

Contact Executive Club
To protect the welfare of our colleagues we’re temporarily reducing our contact centre opening hours to 3am – 3pm Monday to Friday, and 4am – 12pm Saturday and Sunday EST.
If you do not want to setup a Skype account (which takes a matter of minutes) then is it worth just taking the comparatively small financial hit and calling the UK number (of course when it is open which seems to be the same as the USA line) from your mobile/cell phone. Then at least you know that you have tomorrow's flight dealt with.

There is currently no way to cancel a flight online.

Edit: I just called the USA Gold line to test it and it is working fine.
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Old May 17, 20, 6:43 am
  #2297  
Moderator, Iberia Airlines, Airport Lounges, and Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
 
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Originally Posted by Safifi
I just tried calling BA again but after some wait I'm getting a recorded message to say that due to the covid29 situation they have had to reduce their working hours, and are thereby only available at shortened working hours Monday to Friday! I do not have a Skype account to call the number in the UK.

As the departing flight LHR-BOS is scheduled for tomorrow Monday 18/5, is it at all possible to cancel my booking online today and deal with this issue at least? I am quite busy on a Monday with the start of the week.
There are currently no significant queues on the call centre in the UK and USA. (which is actually the same, the USA number internally diverts to either Manchester or Newcastle) The USA number is 7 days a week as is the UK number. Installing Skype is a great time saver in my view, you can have it on your phone or PC or tablet. Google Talk may be another alternative, it will take you less time to do this than to submit a couple of posts on Flyertalk!

You cannot cancel a part trip online unfortunately, I wish you could. You have to be very careful here, you actually want to be offloaded from that flight, you don't want to cancel the ticket (if you want the rebooking option); if you want the Involuntary Refund then you can ask for the ticket to go to the Refunds team. So be careful how you express this.
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Old May 17, 20, 6:46 am
  #2298  
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Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave
There are currently no significant queues on the call centre in the UK and USA. (which is actually the same, the USA number internally diverts to either Manchester or Newcastle)
Indeed, just tried and detailed my experience a few posts up. I really was not struggling to get through at all.
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Old May 17, 20, 6:48 am
  #2299  
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
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Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave
There are currently no significant queues on the call centre in the UK and USA. (which is actually the same, the USA number internally diverts to either Manchester or Newcastle).
Originally Posted by KARFA
Indeed, just tried and detailed my experience a few posts up. I really was not struggling to get through at all.
And I was able to get through calling the USA Gold number and following the exact same strategy as KARFA.
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Old May 17, 20, 7:53 am
  #2300  
Senior Mod and Moderator: Aegean Miles&Bonus and British Airways
 
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@Safifi, I’m afraid we formally need to call a halt here as the earlier mod note has not been adhered to. You have posted about this issue 17 times in this thread. You have been given lots of advice, Including in extremis to go to the airport early if everything else fails, and all the evidence here indicates that apparently everyone else other than you can access multiple phone numbers, including the Gold line, with very fast pick-up times. It does appear this is your issue rather than anyone else’s and we really can’t help you any further - there is no more advice to give.

If you need to post new information having spoken to BA to seek further advice then that’s fine, but we now have no option but to delete any further posts from you that say you can’t get through/can’t resolve your issue etc because they are disrupting the thread and preventing us using our time to help others.

We would appreciate your co-operation at this stage.

/mod
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Old May 17, 20, 9:12 am
  #2301  
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Originally Posted by flashware
Although reports on here have been that where only the return portion of the ticket has been refunded it seems to come in at around 40%, of course there's no hard and fast rule on how it's calculated.
BA was polled on this by Consumer Council Hong Kong along with CX and 18 other airlines serving HKG https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/cath...pensation.html

BA stated to Consumer Council HK that their refund policy when the inbound segment of a round-trip is cancelled is round-trip fare paid minus one-way fare of segment travelled. The footnotes state taxes and surcharges for the cancelled inbound segment will be refunded specifically and excluded from the calculation.

Consumer Council HK did not explicitly state this, but fare for the travelled segments should be historical for this calculation to make sense (contemporaneous with the round-trip fare paid).

There are no specific consumer protection laws in HK covering cancellations so this outcome should be derived from BA's CoC applicable worldwide.

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Old May 17, 20, 10:07 am
  #2302  
Moderator, Iberia Airlines, Airport Lounges, and Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
 
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Originally Posted by percysmith
BA stated to Consumer Council HK that their refund policy when the inbound segment of a round-trip is cancelled is round-trip fare paid minus one-way fare of segment travelled. The footnotes state taxes and surcharges for the cancelled inbound segment will be refunded specifically and excluded from the calculation.
That is definitely the Voluntary Refund process, but it's not my understanding on the Involuntary Refund calculation. My understanding for Involuntary was a straight refund on taxes and fees, a pro-rata refund of charges, and a pro-rata refund of base fares, taking into the account differences in the fare basis between each leg. Looking at my Involuntaries, they are usually in the 40 to 60% range, with an example of 40% being a UK-USA-UK with the return cancel - that booking would have a heavier taxes on the UK-USA sector which operated, whereas the return would be low on taxes and fees. An example of the 60% would be an entirely domestic cancellation since the cancelled sector was the more expensive fare basis. I think it would have to be as I described, otherwise no-one would get any refunds across the Atlantic, since invariably single fares are more expensive than returns.
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Old May 17, 20, 10:39 am
  #2303  
 
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QQ - im sure its on this thread somewhere but I couldn't find it - I have multiple vouchers from BA Holidays and the email says book as normal and then e mail us to have the balance reduced by the voucher amount. Im assuming vouchers like this can just be used against the cost of a flight and doesn't also need to be a BA Holiday?

Chris
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Old May 17, 20, 12:50 pm
  #2304  
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Originally Posted by Chris9642
QQ - im sure its on this thread somewhere but I couldn't find it - I have multiple vouchers from BA Holidays and the email says book as normal and then e mail us to have the balance reduced by the voucher amount. Im assuming vouchers like this can just be used against the cost of a flight and doesn't also need to be a BA Holiday?

Chris
Yes, my understanding is that they can be used in either direction, so you use them on flights instead of BA Holidays. Some FTVs issued for cancelled flights may be tricky to use on BA Holidays, if they have Avios and vouchers tied into them, but in the other direction I can't see a problem. In the case of flights, however, you do need to ring up from the start, until someone here kindly confirms that they work fine with Hold Your Flight.
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Old May 17, 20, 3:11 pm
  #2305  
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
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Quick question, hopefully an easy one.

If my flight gets cancelled and but they rebook me without asking onto a different route that requires an extra stop and arrives a few hours later, is this allowed, or can I choose/demand a refund (since I can't enter the country anyway)?

Arrival at 315pm becomes 11pm given the extra stop.
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Old May 17, 20, 3:20 pm
  #2306  
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Originally Posted by Dan1113
Quick question, hopefully an easy one.

If my flight gets cancelled and but they rebook me without asking onto a different route that requires an extra stop and arrives a few hours later, is this allowed, or can I choose/demand a refund (since I can't enter the country anyway)?

Arrival at 315pm becomes 11pm given the extra stop.
If a flight in your itinerary is canceled you can call and request a refund.
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Old May 18, 20, 3:11 am
  #2307  
 
Join Date: Oct 2016
Posts: 46
Morning,

We had two first seats booked for LHR-HND return mid June 2020. Booked with BA AMEX 2-4-1 and Avios.

I suspected the flights had been cancelled over the weekend and this was kindly confirmed by ISTFlyer

Received notification by text and email this morning that both flights are now cancelled.

Specifically looking at the corona virus guidelines update 3 where you can rebook to another date without the need for availability but within ticket validity:

BA do not seem to be currently selling tickets in the first cabin on services after 24th Oct 2020. Could we ask to be put on the JAL service where first is being sold?

Many thanks......
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Old May 18, 20, 3:19 am
  #2308  
Moderator, Iberia Airlines, Airport Lounges, and Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
 
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Originally Posted by umba815

Specifically looking at the corona virus guidelines update 3 where you can rebook to another date without the need for availability but within ticket validity:

BA do not seem to be currently selling tickets in the first cabin on services after 24th Oct 2020. Could we ask to be put on the JAL service where first is being sold?
I think this is the sort of route where the First cabin may be withdrawn, there was some changes in this space before the pandemic. But no, because you are on Avios even if JAL offered a codeshare on the flight in question I can't see how BA would move you to a JAL revenue ticket. In the unlikely event that JAL has redemption space that may be more arguable, but then the 2-4-1 gets in the way. So by al means ask (and report back) but I thiink your decision tree is going to be about whether you go Club World or whether you just go for a refund / FTV (depending on your plans and 2-4-1 expiry).
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Old May 18, 20, 3:23 am
  #2309  
 
Join Date: Oct 2016
Posts: 46
Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave
I think this is the sort of route where the First cabin may be withdrawn, there was some changes in this space before the pandemic. But no, because you are on Avios even if JAL offered a codeshare on the flight in question I can't see how BA would move you to a JAL revenue ticket. In the unlikely event that JAL has redemption space that may be more arguable, but then the 2-4-1 gets in the way. So by al means ask (and report back) but I thiink your decision tree is going to be about whether you go Club World or whether you just go for a refund / FTV (depending on your plans and 2-4-1 expiry).
Thanks for the speedy response. I'll ring and report back.
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Old May 18, 20, 4:30 am
  #2310  
 
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Final question re "bucket availability"

Originally Posted by KARFA
with a reward booking if you decide to cancel no later than 24 hr before the flight then you get everything back minus the £35 per person cancellation fee. There is no voucher involved.

if the flight is cancelled you are able to rebook or cancel, and if you cancel you get a full refund with no fees being incurred.
If I wish to voluntarily change to another date after booking with Avios, does bucket availability mean I have access to any flight in the class with availability and secondly am I paying a change fee? Thank you.

Follow up...does this not mean that if I find availability on a date that is limited ie low season avios pricing, how does that correlate with a change to another date? If I cannot find a suitable date that is not low season that I either take a voucher for later travel during a low season date or upgrade to the non low season avios or cancel and start again?

Last edited by testycal; May 18, 20 at 4:37 am Reason: I had an ephiphany
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