Grumpyflyer

According to the BBC, BA Holidays has cancelled plans to continue offering breaks to the Caribbean and elsewhere this weekend. (8 Jan 2021).
Quoting from the BBC site, “We’ve been in touch with customers due to travel in the coming days and weeks to offer a refund if their travel plans do not meet Government guidelines for permitted travel .”
“The firm told the BBC earlier this week it is still selling breaks because business people use their holiday packages to aid their travel arrangements.”
Not sure if it changes much from previously published information but it seems that the BBC believes that it does.

TGLoyalty

I think it doesn’t make much sense without this bit “As it's now clear most customers are travelling for leisure, we have decided to withdraw package deals from sale. Customers legally permitted to travel during the lockdown period remain able to book flights for their essential travel via ba.com."

Testing before returning to the UK has probably put the brakes on a significant number of trips even if they were for business or other essential purposes, the risk of being stuck out of the UK for 14 days will be too high.

sunshinebob

Barbados still has a flight a day every day and two on some days. Business only, my ar5e.....

oceanscape

Absolutely ridiculous. Business travelers must make up < 1% of BAHols business, especially at the moment.

rockflyertalk

Apparently there’s a lot of business travellers in Dubai and the Maldives at the moment as well as the Caribbean

VSLover

my colleagues would use BAH for work trips to SFO because you could always snag J and a good hotel at or just under the internal limit. naturally nothing right now...but i am amused the gay drama swirling in the US about the instagram "gays over covid" has broken through to the bbc article! hahaha!

i also cannot imagine what a headache it would have been for BAH to continue whilst we are under lockdown due to the ever changing environment and having to sort those changes for every customer.

ISTFlyer

Just wondering, if I have a BAH booking without touching London and the UK except for the transfer point of my flight ( for example IST-LHR-JFK & New York hotel reservation ), would my reservation still be cancelled due to the UK lockdown?

Note: I am just asking this question for future reference. Obviously, at the moment it's not possible to fly LHR-IST due to the restrictions of the Turkish government.

TGLoyalty

cargo?

I don’t pretend to know the demographics of everyone on the flights and their final destinations, is Barbados a gateway to the rest of the Caribbean? However, consider not everyone on these planes is a British resident and even though there is a pandemic going on people are still trying to get home or start a new home.

I know 2 of two different households which have very recently emigrated to Australia for example.

There are many valid reasons why people leave their home and travel other than business, which is why business is not the only allowable reason.

corporate-wage-slave

If you book LHR-ANU in the next few weeks, a popup comes up at the end of the search process, which prevents you from seeing the hotel listings, and to clear the pop-up (even with a pop-up blocker) you clear down the search and end up at the start query. If you start from somewhere else such as NCE using the French Country/Region then you don't have this problem.

EDIT: that's now been blocked too, BAH aren't selling new trips in the next few weeks.

Confus

Very glad they’ve seen sense and done this, it was starting to be indefensible how blatantly they were promoting what were clearly leisure trips. A good use of peer/media pressure. Now I suppose it only remains to be seen how much of the primarily leisure flight schedule they leave in place for non-holiday customers to use to break the rules.......

ScruttonStreet

I sure hope Liz Truss is reading this article and is going hell-for-leather to sign trade deals with the Dominican Republic, Antigua, Barbados etc. The amount of 'business' these destinations turn out to have with the UK must surely be enough to make up for an Brexit-induced EU losses.

Genius1

There is some, but minimal.

Tafflyer

The mind boggles, and I just spilt my coffee.

zat_dude

I was out for a walk with the kids near the house in Hampshire and heard a large plane overhead (at some height obviously) so decided to open up flightradar. Seeing it was a BA flight from LGW to UVF I immediately wondered how many UK holidaymakers were on the flight.

P.S. Shortly after that there was a Bombardier Global Express passing overhead - on her way from Biggin Hill to St Kitts. At that point I thought they are surely taking the mickey and went home.

firstlight

Having taken this decision to stop sales, they can probably then furlough a lot of the BAH staff at this point to improve cashflow.