Berks89

I have booked a full fare flight in J to the US in a few weeks, but due to medical / family reasons, I had to fly out sooner. BA quoted me £4,000 to change my ticket! I was told over the phone that if I don’t show up for my flight next week, my return flight will be cancelled.

I’ve two questions:

1. I “split” my husband’s booking from mine over the phone, as he still intends to travel on our original flight next week but without me as I’m already in the US. Because he now has a separate booking reference, if I don’t show up for the same flight, will his return also be cancelled, or just mine? I assume just mine…

2. Is there any point in appealing to BA’s goodwill by asking them to make an exception? We are not travelling for a holiday but for a family medical situation, and I’ve no control over it. I get that there’s a contract in place, and I’ve agreed to it, but it does really suck.

I am currently planning to fly back to London next week as I booked a return with United, just so I can travel on the original flight and keep my future ticket which for reasons not worth going into (not status or points related) I really want to keep, not least as the full ticket cost me over £8K. If I can avoid doing this, I’d really like to.

simonsmith

Will your travel insurance not help if was an emergency?

Anonba

Are you sure this is a full J ticket with fully flexible rules? The £4000 quoted seems an awful lot as usually J class would be around the same cost, unless you were changing the itinerary considerably. If it is fully flexible ticket a full refund would be possible, just minus the service fee of £15 per person. It would be possible to split and cancel just yourself by calling. However I think your first question when you call is what are my fare rules, to check if it is as you think.

RichieMc

Sorry about the emergency, plus the hassle of the ticket and travel issue. Hope everyone is ok. Couple of things: BA has always been extremely accommodating when I’ve had medical issues. Admittedly these were always my own issues. But I think they are also flexible when it is immediate family: children, spouse, etc. The other major thing is that a full fare J ticket should be extremely flexible and cancelable without fee. Seems nuts that they’ve apparently told you it has essentially zero flexibility.

corporate-wage-slave

Splitting a PNR does work here - your husband will end up with a separate and standalone reservation and so long a Companion Voucher wasn't involved, as soon as you are split off then his reservation is no longer affected by your actions on the original PNR. I can't see any downsides to doing this if there is a chance of the scenarios mentioned, apart from the more trivial points about making it harder to be sat next to each other.

Like the other contributors, flexible tickets usually are flexible, I'm wondering if the dates / flights used for changing are just extra expensive ones and whether you would get a better fare by going for a slightly different date. But that's not possible to work out given the information provided.

krispy84

Sorry for the medical issues OP.

Can you clarify, are you using J as a shorthand for business class? Or is J your fare class? If it is the fare class then you should be able to change flights effectively free of charge. If you have purchased a business class ticket in a fare class ‘lower’ than J, then you will likely have restrictions and may have to pay to change flights.

Berks89

Thank you very much. This does concern my child so perhaps I will call and explain. To date I haven’t given any explanation, just that I need to move the booking. I am actually a bit confused as to why they quoted me so much to change it. I thought it was a fully flexible ticket also, but it seems not. I have an email from them at the time I did the booking. I had logged out from my BA exec account midway through making the booking and they sent me an email asking me if I wanted to continue. It says very clearly it was a J fare. Unfortunately the person I was speaking to in the call centre was friendly but not particularly helpful so I’ll try again.

thank you, I appreciate it. I have replied to another message on here. I believe it was J, full fare with flexibility, but it’s possible of course that when I made the booking this wasn’t actually the case.

Thank you, knowing that his return won’t be affected is very reassuring. I will try to find out more on why the email from BA - midway through booking my flights - said that this was a fully flexible J fare but seemingly it isn’t if they’re now quoting me a huge sum of money to change it. When I originally spoke to them, I just had to get on a flight asap, but now I’m here in the US I have time to do a bit more digging.

Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it. I’ve gone into a bit more detail in my replies to some others here about why I thought this was a full fare J ticket. After nearly an hour on the phone to BA the other day, when I just had to get out to the US asap, I wanted to but didn’t really have the time to enquire about why they were quoting me £4,000. I was just completely shocked.

SteveinA2

You don't have a J fare as this is fully changeable
If the additional cost if $4000 then your fare is probably not even a J sub class
That said, BA are typically helpful in family emergencies, so HUCA if you get nowhere

salut0

One thought: not sure what exact route this is, but have you looked at changing the flight to a different date where there might be connecting flight availability via other points in the USA? Eg if LHR-JFK is sold out in the fare class you originally bought then try LHR via BOS/ORD/PHL/DFW/RDU/MIA to LGA/EWR/JFK.

ijgordon

Typically when you change the outbound leg, you have to re-price the entire itinerary as if you were making an entirely new booking. This may be the case with full fares as well, although in that case the new fare shouldn’t be much different from the old fare. So there’s likely something going on that’s resulting in a 4k fare difference. For example if the original ticket had a 90 day advance purchase requirement and now your new outbound is only 2 weeks away. Full J fares usually don’t have advance purchase requirements so it’s unlikely you actually had one. F course you may have a refundable fare, those can often be had for only a few hundred £ more than the cheapest fare.

etiene

It’s not the whole PNR that gets cancelled if you no show, right?Just the traveller’s ticket is cancelled. OP’s husband would be fine so long as he travelled as planned, regardless of splitting the PNR.

Of course, that’s irrelevant now as it’s already done and is necessary to do anything different for OP’s ticket. I’m betting that advance purchase explains the fare difference asked, but if this was truly J fare class I would have expected it to be refundable.

nufnuf77

I think you may well have fully flexible J ticket. but there is a big difference between doing say LHR-JFK-LHR in J vs doing just JFK-LHR in J. I wouldnt be surprised if the latter cost more than the former!!!

Berks89

UPDATE. I have spoken to BA.

1. I told them I received an email from BA midway through the booking process which clearly stipulates that the tickets I was booking were J fare. I completed my booking by clicking on the link at the bottom of the email to complete the booking. I remember now that I even called BA at the time to confirm that a J ticket would be fully flexible, and they confirmed it would be. However, BA are telling me that their system shows this is an I ticket. Perhaps I need to write to them with all the information I have as the lady on the phone wasn’t able to do anything about it?

2. Anyway, BA have sent off a request to one of their internal teams to cancel my original ticket and provide a full refund, and to offset this refund against the cost of a single ticket from the US to London. The lady didn’t know if this will be possible but she has made the request, so we will see. We did explain the situation.

BA also confirmed that if I’m a no show on our outbound, this won’t result in the cancellation of my husband’s return, as we have split our bookings.

Thanks to everyone for the advice and kind words. It has been immensely helpful in dealing with BA, so far! For completeness, we are travelling LHR>DFW>IDA and were due to return to LHR direct from Denver.

salut0

Is that the best decision? If BA would refund your roundtrip as a travel voucher you could use for rebooking any BA flight, I'd look into redeeming miles for the one-way DEN-LHR or paying for a one-way on a different airline, rather than spending the BA credit on the cost of a BA one-way fare. I suspect you'll get better value if you can put the refunded roundtrip ticket money towards another roundtrip starting in LHR (or even an ex-EU).

Berks89

They just emailed me. They aren’t refunding the full fare, only the taxes. The taxes will be credited against the DEN-LHR ticket, but I also have to pay a change fee of £300 plus a contact centre fee of £30. So it’s about £1,500 in total. Hmm.