copenhagenBA

Its happening on all airlines, BA is just the same.. I'm beginning to wonder if airlines are just continuing to showcase "fake" routes from the winter schedule pre-covid in order to take customers bookings. When the airline involuntarily cancels the flight, they may well be hoping that X pc of the bookers keep their cash in with the company via the voucher system.

There's absolutely no way for example that BA should continue to showcase routes in Europe for October 1st with 6 flights a day when the reality is you will have 1 maximum 2, and these flights will be set. It wont be different flights for different demand on differing days. Everybody knows nothing will change in the next month or foreseable months. A vaccine will not be available in one moth.

Airlines should take some responsibility on this.

mikeyfly

I think the first 3/4 months was wishful thinking. Not so sure now.

If people want to dream about a trip - and book and pay - why is the airline the baddie ?

Truthmonkey

Things are changing every week.

I don't subscribe to a conspiracy theory that this is a deliberate attempt to take customers' money with no intention of delivering service; it would very hard, and very unwise for an airline to engage in something that could be argued to be fraud.

I suspect it's more a case of optimism, planning and risk assessment.

Sailbot3310

Quite a lot of people I know have made bookings on thecheap with the hope they would be cancelled to move to peak dates 2021, and most have paid off. Worst case is taking a FTV. It's just a gamble which flights will remain but if you look at the month-prior you can get a feeling for what times are sticking around.

The flipside is, it's making booking for actual trips in October/November very difficult as often the cancelled flight (the one you actually want) moves +/-6 hours which messes up plans when you have trains to book (etc.). One recent cancellation means we now need to take a train that is over 200 euros more expensive (for 2 of us); that's more than the flights!

I'd have assumed BA should be able to make realistic forecasts a bit more than 4 weeks out (e.g October from now) - as you mentioned there's not a chance some destinations are going to jump from 1 flight to 6 flights in 4 weeks.

imkevinmc

It's a thankless task. I was due to be in Split this weekend and their covid figures were great until 2 weeks ago. Certainly below the UK government threshold of 20.00 per 100K Look at them now.This is the quotable site that most people rely upon

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea

How is any industry that operates any type of reasonable lead time supposed to deal with this. At least BA offer a voucher scheme. The point to point airlines attitude is "well, we're flying. Why shouldn't you". I can't justify 14 days isolation for a 5 day trip.

corporate-wage-slave

Mostly these are services which were originally plugged into the schedule 355 days ago, when the world was rather different. At some point you need to take a realistic view about what a viable slate of services will look like, but when do you do that? There is no perfect answer here, I remember giving people advice back in April about how it would perhaps be possible to travel to the USA in the autumn - and that was pessimistic. So when is the best time to cancel? I am not sure I have an answer on that, but the one thing that causes a lot of problems is when BA cancel a lot of flights on the same day. So we've ended up with a drip-drip-drip effect.

GumshoeW12

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KARFA

Under the current coronavirus cancellation guidelines, if a BA flight on your booking is cancelled you can move it on the same route up to a year from when you made the booking, and as long as there is space in the cabin you do not have to pay any fare difference. At some point this may revert back to standard guidelines which only allow dates within -3/+14 of the original date without a fare difference.

VSLover

definitely not. part of the marketing push was to show they are flying to all these places to encourage us to get out and that "everything is like is used to be!" in a way.

obviously the sale had limited impact as we are seeing now with service adjustments for the fall, but i think any reasonable person would be able to understand that just because ten people have a ticket for a tuesday flight to split (for example) they should still operate. it is a way for BA to get them into a deeper economic hole of course, and makes no fiscal sense, much like opening an outstation lounge because a dozen eligible pax may be in the airport one day.

James91

I agree with all of this, I just wish they were more flexible with rerouting. I've been bullish about the COVID-19 situation but I've had some really last minute cancelations and when you call they're very polite but it's just "computer says no" on using other carriers. It's made me (someone who was very keen to get back to traveling) far less likely to book now, whereas had they put me on other carriers when they canceled I wouldn't be.

DYKWIA

Definitely agree. I made a similar post a while back on the EK forum when they were showing virtually a full schedule from July. Of course, the vast majority of flights were cancelled - and EK have been terrible in refunding (there are still people complaining about 90+ days waiting without refund).

jonas123

The scheduling teams are I'm sure working flat out just fixing the schedule for the next month ahead, and this is a continuous moving beast. Unfortunately for the customers, there is no real need for any airline to cancel a flight more than 14 days out, so they might as well keep them in the system and monitor where the demand is, then cancel as appropriate to avoid EU261 kicking in. It's also not in the interests of the airline to cancel early and have to refund that cash back. If BA or any airline decided it wanted to publish a realistic schedule for the winter, it would suddenly have to cancel a whole heap of flights and cause a big cash outflow - not good right now.

Lastly we still haven't heard anything about winter slot alleviation, so if the worse comes to the worse (for the airlines) and they have to fly just to keep slots, then this flying may have to remain.

VSLover

ah, well yes i can definitely understand your frustration with this--as it is not something i have run up against so far! i would hope they become more flexible in line with AA, for example, because we have seen BA be less than when it came to dates on FTVs and refunds and all of those windows--they seem to be behind is willingness to push them back in a way that makes sense--which does make planning a nightmare.

HIDDY

It's not that long ago BA were selling seats on the EZE route starting early September yet some folk were complaining and saying they should be restarting operating the route again in August because other airlines were. They've since been forced to cancel the September flights due to the worsening situation here.

drvannostren

I think to be fair, they're not gonna NOT show flights to book right? That's their whole business.

The premier league doesn't come out and say "Hey btw, fans will not be in any buildings in the 2020-2021 season". No they take your money up front, then they'll refund the portion back that goes unused. BA has a schedule that they WANT to stick to, only closer to the date can they say for certain what will and will not fly. Who knows, maybe South Africa closes it's borders entirely next month. Maybe Canada is wide open to Brits. Maybe the US goes up in flames. We can't say right, so there's no sense in putting 100 flights a day to Canada and 0 to the US, just like there's no sense in putting 0 flights to the US in the first place. So they'll continue to load flights as normal, as planned, including new routes in most cases, then they'll pare them down as necessary.

You don't NEED to book now. The biggest thing is, if there's something you WANT to book or NEED to book now, go ahead and do it, then cross your fingers it'll get flown as planned. If you don't need/want to do anything right now, there's no need to.