Last edit by: plunet
Because of the scale of the disruption resulting from an IT system outage, most passengers should expect to make their own arrangements to mitigate the disruption as BA will not have resources to assist all passengers.
Your travel plans are probably in tatters, you should give BA a chance to fix things for you.
Firstly do not cancel or refund or credit to a voucher your ticket if this option exists as you effectively voluntarily cancel the contract for transportation with BA by doing so and hence end any right to claim for replacement transport, duty of care, or anything else.
If BA.com is working, at least give it a go and see if Manage my Booking is giving you any sensible options. You don't have to take the option(s) presented if they do not meet your needs and you might be able to find better options yourself. However, not that by default BA will be only offering rebooking onto BA and any Joint-Ventre carriers and possible OneWorld partners. If there are no sensible options, document it (take a picture). Also try the BA app, it may work when the website doesn't, or vice versa. Take a screenshot of any errors you get when trying to log in or do anything reasonable.
Try calling the call centre. You probably won't get through in a sensible length of time, but document that you made several calls. Take a screenshot and save it.
If you have made reasonable attempts to contact BA and have not been able to do so, this now puts you in a strong position to organise your own onward travel arrangements, and to claim the difference from BA later. You need to act reasonably, choose travel arrangements that are similar where possible to what you had purchased from BA, and where possible you should document with photos or screen shots that the actions you are taking are reasonable, there are no other cheaper options. Even if you don't plan to use it for booking, use a comparison service to show current market costs for the transport you are choosing. BA should respond positively to customer service claims for the cost of onward transport where you can show that BA were unable to provide you timely assistance to rebook. You should do this bearing in mind what coverage you might have from your own travel insurance policy and whether your planned trip is salvageable or if it is entirely in vain and should be abandoned. Note that BA are not responsible for consequential costs beyond their initial contract for transport, but any insurance you may have could be.
BA have a duty of care under the UK successor to EU Regulation 261/2004 and based upon forum experience the following costs would usually be claimable from BA without any significant pushback.
25 for reasonable meal/refreshment expenses (per adult per day)
2 reasonable phone calls per customer
If an overnight stay is required in a location a significant distance from your home address
200 for a hotel room (for 2 people)
50 Transport to/from the airport (round trip)
Although BA has suggested some guideline costs for duty of care as indicated above, EU Regulation 261/2004 doesn't specify any monetary cap. By documenting (take a screen capture of a hotel comparison site for example) that there were no cheaper alternatives, it is possible that claims exceeding the guideline costs suggested by BA may be met, but having additional evidence or justification for costs going over these limits would be sensible. Expenses not covered by BA may be claimable from your travel insurance subject to possible policy excesses.
Duty of care is separate from fixed sum compensation (EUR 250 to 600 depending on the flight distance) for flight delays/cancellations, which may or may not be payable under EU Regulation 261/2004 depending on whether BA can show that the flight delay was caused by 'extraordinary circumstances' and that it took 'all reasonable measures' to avoid the resulting delay. Also, airlines do not usually entertain claims for consequential losses (for example, the cost of prepaid accomodation which you can't now use), so you would need to look to your travel insurance for these costs.
EU Regulation 261/2004 does not cover delayed/damaged/lost baggage. The Montreal Convention sets an upper limit for delayed/damaged/lost baggage compensation. For more information, visit the BA.com webpage on delayed/damaged/lost baggage - see https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb...amaged-baggage
Set your expectation for the turnaround time for any refunds, claims, etc. It could be more like weeks rather than days, consider this if cashflow is concern.
You can read the forum thread for guidance on EU Regulation 261/2004 https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/brit...61-2004-a.html or check back on these forums later for more advice on claiming, but first of all look after yourself during this disruption.
Your travel plans are probably in tatters, you should give BA a chance to fix things for you.
Firstly do not cancel or refund or credit to a voucher your ticket if this option exists as you effectively voluntarily cancel the contract for transportation with BA by doing so and hence end any right to claim for replacement transport, duty of care, or anything else.
If BA.com is working, at least give it a go and see if Manage my Booking is giving you any sensible options. You don't have to take the option(s) presented if they do not meet your needs and you might be able to find better options yourself. However, not that by default BA will be only offering rebooking onto BA and any Joint-Ventre carriers and possible OneWorld partners. If there are no sensible options, document it (take a picture). Also try the BA app, it may work when the website doesn't, or vice versa. Take a screenshot of any errors you get when trying to log in or do anything reasonable.
Try calling the call centre. You probably won't get through in a sensible length of time, but document that you made several calls. Take a screenshot and save it.
If you have made reasonable attempts to contact BA and have not been able to do so, this now puts you in a strong position to organise your own onward travel arrangements, and to claim the difference from BA later. You need to act reasonably, choose travel arrangements that are similar where possible to what you had purchased from BA, and where possible you should document with photos or screen shots that the actions you are taking are reasonable, there are no other cheaper options. Even if you don't plan to use it for booking, use a comparison service to show current market costs for the transport you are choosing. BA should respond positively to customer service claims for the cost of onward transport where you can show that BA were unable to provide you timely assistance to rebook. You should do this bearing in mind what coverage you might have from your own travel insurance policy and whether your planned trip is salvageable or if it is entirely in vain and should be abandoned. Note that BA are not responsible for consequential costs beyond their initial contract for transport, but any insurance you may have could be.
BA have a duty of care under the UK successor to EU Regulation 261/2004 and based upon forum experience the following costs would usually be claimable from BA without any significant pushback.
25 for reasonable meal/refreshment expenses (per adult per day)
2 reasonable phone calls per customer
If an overnight stay is required in a location a significant distance from your home address
200 for a hotel room (for 2 people)
50 Transport to/from the airport (round trip)
Although BA has suggested some guideline costs for duty of care as indicated above, EU Regulation 261/2004 doesn't specify any monetary cap. By documenting (take a screen capture of a hotel comparison site for example) that there were no cheaper alternatives, it is possible that claims exceeding the guideline costs suggested by BA may be met, but having additional evidence or justification for costs going over these limits would be sensible. Expenses not covered by BA may be claimable from your travel insurance subject to possible policy excesses.
Duty of care is separate from fixed sum compensation (EUR 250 to 600 depending on the flight distance) for flight delays/cancellations, which may or may not be payable under EU Regulation 261/2004 depending on whether BA can show that the flight delay was caused by 'extraordinary circumstances' and that it took 'all reasonable measures' to avoid the resulting delay. Also, airlines do not usually entertain claims for consequential losses (for example, the cost of prepaid accomodation which you can't now use), so you would need to look to your travel insurance for these costs.
EU Regulation 261/2004 does not cover delayed/damaged/lost baggage. The Montreal Convention sets an upper limit for delayed/damaged/lost baggage compensation. For more information, visit the BA.com webpage on delayed/damaged/lost baggage - see https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb...amaged-baggage
Set your expectation for the turnaround time for any refunds, claims, etc. It could be more like weeks rather than days, consider this if cashflow is concern.
You can read the forum thread for guidance on EU Regulation 261/2004 https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/brit...61-2004-a.html or check back on these forums later for more advice on claiming, but first of all look after yourself during this disruption.
"Systems Down" 22-26 Feb 2022 [General discussion]
#46
Join Date: Jan 2016
Location: LON
Programs: BAEC
Posts: 3,931
I have asked the mods to change the title of this thread to make it less LHR specific and I have added a Wikipost to the head of thread with basic self-help details from the 2017 IT Outage thread.
#48
Join Date: Nov 2016
Location: Sussex
Programs: BA; IHG; LHW; Hilton
Posts: 797
#49
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 193
Until the BA bean counters and top management realise that robust, secure, reliable, user friendly IT is a must have, not a nice to have, we will be having these conversations and they will spend considerable amounts of time, cash and goodwill digging themselves out of these self inflected hell holes.
Good luck today to those traveling!
Good luck today to those traveling!
#50
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 7,259
[Brief historic excursus plus soapbox rant]
BA had an IT department which, however fraught with faults, managed to keep the incredibly complex IT structure of the airline alive. BA's IT architecture was, back in 2016/17, a maze. A mixture of in-house developed software, legacy stuff, new and shiny toys and LOTS of bespoke software. BA managed to take SAP and change it so much that SAP themselves had said "Nope. We ain't touching that anymore". It was a world in need of large investment, not only with the introduction of Altea, but there were many more things to do: cloud computing, APIs, better interoperability, new systems needed for cabin crew/flight crew scheduling, flight scheduling and so on.
At this point IAG came around and said: rather than having one BA IT department, one IB IT department and so on... we'll have ONE IAG department. GBS will do it, as well as Procurement. So the idea was to make people redundant, outsource the grunt of the work to TCS, retain a few people and be done with it. I remember one IT head from Newcastle saying in a meeting, rather gloomily, "within a few years you won't have enough BA IT people to fill the BA5" (the shuttle bus between T5 and WTS).
HAL suggested BA not to do it. They'd done precisely this themselves a few years back and it was a bloodbath, so much so that they had to re-insource at least the business analysis and system engineering side of things. BA also had a taste of things to come as Alex's first big thing, the "BA dragon's den" thingy for the App, failed spectacularly. There were rumours that Andy Lord was kicked out because he was making a fuss about it. Who knows. Anyway, off they go, people get the chop, I think 1-2,000 people had to leave when all was said and done. Poor TCS, CBRE and others inherited a wildly complicated environment for which they had little training, even less documentation and no know-how. You can't replace the knowledge learned on the job by people who'd been dealing with the servers in Cranebank and Boho house for years. And in fact it started to go to sh*t. May 2017, the bank holiday outage. Then BA.com couldn't sell for a couple of days. Then more, and more, and more.
When I left in '19 the new order of the game, having IAG GBS gotten a little bit of a handle on things, was 'modernization'. They wanted to go cloud based (yay!), introduce APIs between systems (double yay!), even microservices for applications (whoa!). I left with the move to the cloud not late: worse than that. It's no wonder that things go to pot when you try to do that, which I think they're still trying to. Personally, I'd perhaps have done the move before firing my IT guys, but that's just me.
And now I hear Virgin Atlantic is doing the same thing...
[/historic excursus and soapbox moment]
#51
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: JER
Programs: BAEC
Posts: 819
Until the BA bean counters and top management realise that robust, secure, reliable, user friendly IT is a must have, not a nice to have, we will be having these conversations and they will spend considerable amounts of time, cash and goodwill digging themselves out of these self inflected hell holes.
Good luck today to those traveling!
Good luck today to those traveling!
Imagine a hotel app that routinely didn't allow you to click through into individual bookings but just showed an error message instead. It wouldn't last five minutes.
#52
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: UK
Programs: BA GfL & GGL, FB Platinum, MB Titanium, Hilton Diamond
Posts: 2,426
I had to rush to the gate as not all gates are appearing on the screens at GF Lounge so its only when people enquire that they find out that boarding has started or worse
The monitors in the terminals dont seem to be affected which is weird.
The monitors in the terminals dont seem to be affected which is weird.
#53
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Gloucestershire
Programs: BA Gold (ex-GGL, maybe future Silver), Hilton Diamond
Posts: 6,206
Until the BA bean counters and top management realise that robust, secure, reliable, user friendly IT is a must have, not a nice to have, we will be having these conversations and they will spend considerable amounts of time, cash and goodwill digging themselves out of these self inflected hell holes.
- The budget to actually buy that kind of IT?
- The ability to procure effectively so that the winning bids will deliver that, and not just respond to the wrong incentives around cost, penalties, etc.?
- The inherent knowledge needed to transfer the flaky legacy systems (and how they work) into a more scalable, replicable and robust environment so that the people with that knowledge can enjoy a comfortable retirement?
- The ability to articulate what robust, secure, reliable, user-friendly IT looks like to their service provider? (Or, failing that, the confidence to take a hands-off approach to the SP so that they can develop a system?)
- The ability to carry out the acceptance tests with the provider to ensure that the system achieves those goals?
#54
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 7,259
Even if they realize that, do they have:
- The budget to actually buy that kind of IT?
- The ability to procure effectively so that the winning bids will deliver that, and not just respond to the wrong incentives around cost, penalties, etc.?
- The inherent knowledge needed to transfer the flaky legacy systems (and how they work) into a more scalable, replicable and robust environment so that the people with that knowledge can enjoy a comfortable retirement?
- The ability to articulate what robust, secure, reliable, user-friendly IT looks like to their service provider? (Or, failing that, the confidence to take a hands-off approach to the SP so that they can develop a system?)
- The ability to carry out the acceptance tests with the provider to ensure that the system achieves those goals?
2. BA always sucked at procurement. Not just in getting the right supplier but in managing them. IAG, well, has a lot fangs in managing suppliers but as for choosing... the cost at the end of bill is what they base themselves on. But doesn't, these days?
3. That's the key issue. I know that the connies were left a lot of gaps when the old BA IT heads went. I mean, documentation that had never been updated once since Adam and Eve, that sort of stuff. Now they might know what to do on day-to-day, but when it comes to making changes... God help them.
4. I think so, and I think the ISPs know what it is too. Sure, an airline is, say, different from a bank but there's enough thinking heads left to articulate that properly, and new people were coming in. Sure, it ain't Google.
5. I think that today (and the App changes) prove that maybe there's more to work on that.
#59
Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club, easyJet and Ryanair
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: UK/Las Vegas
Programs: BA Gold (GGL/CCR)
Posts: 15,946
#60
Join Date: Nov 2004
Programs: BA GGL, LH FTL
Posts: 3,580
I'm not saying that TCS or whoever is blameless in these failures, but if the client either isn't willing to pay for what they need (no matter how important they think it is) or if the client can't articulate what its own business looks like (but still wants to retain control while not being able to actually exert control over anything than the service delivery manager standing in front of them) then outsourcing won't succeed.