Atlantic 101

Hi All.

wondering if I can make a claim for denied boarding. It’s a bit of a weird situation however.

I had a flight ex Spain cancelled during the snow in the UK last week. I called up BA and was re routed on Iberia the same day.

Fast forward, I get to check in, all good. Get boarding pass, check bags in. As I am getting my boarding pass checked at the gate I am pulled to the side and told I am not able to travel as ‘BA have not paid’. Never experienced that before.

I assume i can make a claim for this? I mean, I was literally denied boarding and I have the physical boarding pass. For what it’s worth I was eventually re routed back to London on BA the following day.

Thanks for any info!

navylad

I think technically you can’t- you haven’t presented a valid ticket since it hasn’t been paid, and also denied boarding is against the operating carrier (although of course who knows who is at fault here- certainly IAG) but I’d suggest this would make you in scope for EC261/04 despite the original cause being due to the weather as due to the issue you weren’t rerouted appropriately. I suspect someone with more experience in this area will hopefully give more advice to confirm.

Good luck.

corporate-wage-slave

Tricky this one, since technically it's Iberia who denied you boarding and this liable for compensation. The fact they were not being paid, despite being the same company, isn't part of the regulation, so your boarding pass is evidence that you were ticketed. However Iberia have a habit of making it as difficult as possible to extract EC261 out of them.

So I'd suggest you just do a simple delay compensation claim to BA, noting that the Iberia reservation was ticketed but not invoiced due to mistakes by the Contact Centre. You also get the Right to Care costs. Keep your IB boarding pass safe or take a photo.

Scots_Al

While I appreciate they are different companies, they are companies wholly within the same group. This would have been easy for them to sort out later. Really disappointing that someone chose to take a "computer says no" attitude instead of taking ownership of the situation to find a positive resolution for the customer.

Go after them for every penny you can get - they deserve it.

erik123

Maybe the ticket wasn't reissued correctly? Though typically that should prevent you from checking-in. BA should be able to tell.

George K

Can I ask one question? Do you have your boarding pass, still? Does it have a ticket number on it?

Something like this almost happened to us a few years ago. BA flight back to London cancelled, and rerouted via Madrid with Iberia and Iberia Express. I couldn't do seat selection or check-in online but called IB the day before and was actually offered seat selection over the phone and assurances that everything was fine with the booking. At the airport, the agent printed boarding passes for all of us and we were about to leave the counter when she actually called us back to say... that this booking wasn't actually ticketed!

Thankfully we were at the airport early enough to go to the customer services desk (this was in Nice) who took control of the situation, told us that BA hadn't actually paid for the booking (same situation as you) and even though it took about 45 minutes and numerous phonecalls to their colleagues (and possibly BA), they got us new boarding passes and sent us on our way just in time for boarding. A stressful day, but up until that day I wouldn't have thought that a boarding pass can be issued without a ticket number.

Turns out.. it can.

nufnuf77

You can’t check in without valid eticket. The fact you checked in and had BP in your hands shows ticket existed and was ‘OPEN’ status.

Anything beyond that is completely outside your control - Iberia couldn’t possibly expect you to know about what settlement method or invoicing happened between BA and IB

ajamieson

Agree, it's a still a BA problem and thus a BA delay (albeit a very long one). Totally on them to fix, unfortunately.

SK AAR

If there was no valid ticket (because BA failed to reissue) this is not denied boarding which would be against IB (there is nothing to blame IB; one can't expect IB to accept a pax without valid ticket). You need to take this up with BA but again it is not denied boarding as BA is not the operator of the flight.

ScienceTeacher

OP had a boarding pass, so it had to be ticketed. I believe you can't get a BP without one?

craigthemif

IIRC Iberia let you print out your boarding pass well in advance of T-24 hours. Naturally you could cancel your ticket before boarding and the airline systems would need to be aware of this.

Of course it makes little sense that the OP had a valid e-ticket at the time of BP issuance, but that somebody cancelled that ticket before the flight.

PVDtoDEL

Ticketing is not necessary to issue a boarding pass. Before etickets, the ticket coupon was a separate document that was collected separately from the boarding pass. Paper ticket coupons are rare these days (typically only used for FIMs), but the systems are still set up to support that edge case.

mario

What a lot of FTers forget is that airlines moved away from paper tickets years ago and in the process, saved quite some £££. Moving to a dematerialised ticketing process has lots of benefits but would always result in a small number of cases just like this one - the OP reasonably believed that they were on their merry way, having a BP in hand and all.

I would treat this as a separate EU261 claim. IB could go claim that compensation money from BA, for all I care.

It is unreasonable to expect the average passenger to know about ticket numbers, whether the tickets would have been issued or not and IB was wrong in providing a boarding pass to the passenger if they were not going to fly them. This ended up severely limiting their options; had OP been alerted for the ticketing issue at the time they attempted to check in, maybe something could have been done. By informing the passenger as they were at that gate, IB removed that option.

I would be prepared to MCOL all of this, etc. - which is something that if the OP is not prepared to do, then there's no point in complaining as IB won't pay out without being forced to do so.

GUWonder

Sometimes the systems play catch-up. So sometimes even when an airline pushes out a boarding pass against a ticketed booking where a ticket may or may not be out of sync with the booking’s confirmed flights, it’s possible that the boarding pass later is found out of sync with a booking or even gets invalidated for purposes of boarding (or even proceeding to and through airport security in some places). Had such a thing happen to me at ARN just last month that just made my day longer than it should have been. Will be putting in for EC 261/2004 — but that’s because even after the tickets were reissued properly and landed in sync with the confirmed flights, the delay was long enough that the delay compensation claim gets triggered (and seems like an easier fight to win than a denied boarding claim).

bzado

Could you remind me what the other ticket statuses are? I think I had my ticket unmatched by BA ticketing and then had a status that was something like 'MISMATCH,' which caused me to miss my flight.