South London Bon Viveur

Just as I was about to round off a near perfect couple of months of BA flying my luck turned today.

The short story is that I flew (or was supposed to fly) SIN-LHR-OSL yesterday (arriving this morning). The SIN flight was due to arrive at 05:45 (I think- it's the BA16, I am sure a few on here will know its timings) and the T3 OSL departure was 07:35. We were a bit late into LHR but I was on the connection bus to T3 by 06:30, which for a 06:55 boarding time seemed ok to me. And it was- I got to the gate just as boarding commenced. However as I presented by boarding pass I was told I was offloaded. There seemed to be a bit of head scratching as to why, and some questions around whether the SIN flight had been late (yes it had been, but only a bit). I was directed to the T3 lounge where the agent told me that I was offloaded during the SIN flight and re-booked on a morning flight tomorrow, as all flights were full today.

Given that I had work to do today I protested politely and was told that I could be rebooked onto LH via FRA, which they duly did. It was a faff, but i got to my destination with a delay of around 4.5 hours and, as a bonus, my bag made it too (I was convinced it wouldn't).

It then occurred to me that the in flight lead had told me during the SIN flight that i had been rebooked onto the morning departure, but I had dismissed this as a mistake, given that I was already on that morning departure. What neither he nor I realised was that I had been re-booked for tomorrow's departure- clearly a pro-active offload/rebook. Given that I made the flight in plenty of time this does seem like a bit of a pointless offload, which apart from anything else would have cost BA a bit (I presume LH don't do mates rates for last minute one way bookings in C).

My questions:

1) Is this an automated decision or does a human being make the decision to offload? I presume the former.

2) Can the decision be overridden by the gate agent? The T3 lounge agent seemed to imply that they could have done (though in fairness they did say at the gate that due to yesterday's disruption the flight was completely full).

3) Does the decision making take into account nationality/visa status? What if I had not been re-booked on LH and would have been forced to wait until tomorrow, but didn't have permission to enter the UK- would I simply have to sleep airside in T3? That's not very premium.

The collective FT wisdom eagerly anticipated.

corporate-wage-slave

It's a largely automatic process but overseen by an outsourced company in New Delhi. I have quite a bit more to say about this but it will need me to get to a proper keyboard. Suffice to say I have many concerns about this.

EuropeanPete

Presumably that�s a case of involuntary denied boarding, on top of the LH fare?

TRISTAR1979

A similar thing happened to me. We were offloaded from our LHR to HER whilst in the air from INV. When we got to LHR nobody could do anything about it. My in-laws who were connecting from GLA confirmed that another couple were in our seats.

It wasn�t all bad though we were rerouted with Aegean Air, and got comped for the rerouting, so we got paid to receive a much better level of service.

It did seem very automated, but it cost BA almost half of what we paid for the holiday in compensation alone, so I suspect this is an automated task which might save a couple of salaries but is costing them in unnecessary compensation and re ticketing.

bpg5075

I had a similar experience, connecting from an ex-EU BA flight landing at T5 to an AA flight from T3 to the USA. We landed with a 15 minute weather-related delay, but I still made it to the gate 45 minutes before departure. On scanning my boarding card, I found that I had been offloaded, and was informed by AA that all remaining seats were already given to standby passengers. I ended up getting put on the next flight, arriving about 90 minutes after originally scheduled.

I filed an EC261 claim with BA for involuntarily denied boarding and received a 600 EUR payout after a couple of weeks.

carrotjuice

How did you get EUR600 payout... for arriving just 90 minutes from originally scheduled?

KARFA

they claimed for involuntary denied boarding, not delay compensation

Sigwx

Yes this will have had the involvement of the WNS team based in India. Given the airborn time of 1544z on the 19th and a planned flight time of 14:02 and the statistical taxi in time the WNS team would have had the flight flagged in �Transview� and other systems. The time interval for a T5-T3 transfer based on the estimated time of arrival taking the above into account would have triggered your offload and rebooking, hence the update the IFM received. Some of these decisions are made in haste from my observations and once made, only �Revman Ops� can give authorisation to reverse it from my understanding.

cauchy

They probably wanted your seat and it was either sold or used to rebook someone from the day before.

So, assuming you would have been like 99% of passengers and accepted your fate, the algorithm assigns a �0 cost for this episode � as someone would have to be accommodated overnight, to go to Oslo on BA the next day anyway, and the only question is is it you or someone who got their flight cancelled the day before. Whereas if indeed you did miss the onward flight to OSL (maybe because of another BA screw up) and they did nothing, because BA doesn�t have a robust standby process, they would end up wasting the seat and now there are twice as many passengers who still need to go to Oslo.

The problem here is they are managing failure rather than pulling out all the stops for their passengers.

ajamieson

Great! Another process that takes decisions away from the people most likely to know what's best, and can't be easily over-ridden.

Koru Flyer

I had exactly the same situation last month with a SIN to NUE where I was rebooked much much later on LH. Ignoring the advice from BA to go to flight connections, I went to T3 and to the BA desk and was rebooked, after the agent went off to some back room, on the original flight, and the luggage managed the journey as well.

so if you think you can make it to T3 I would try, but you cannot leave it to the gate to fix. There is a BA desk right before security.

tigertanaka

I'm still waiting on an IDB claim after being offloaded whilst on the domestic leg of a NCL-LHR-MUC in September - this was despite making T5 conformance with 5 minutes to spare. I was eventually rebooked on LH (I had to really push for it as the next BA flight was full and BA thought I would be happy twiddling my thumbs in T5 for 5 hours) so arrived at MUC only 2 hours late in the end but my feeling was that I kept my end of the bargain and BA didn't.

Hope the OP puts in a claim for this (plus double dips the miles on *A/LH).

corporate-wage-slave

Yes, so indeed the team in India are automatically rebooking people as soon as a flight looks sufficiently late that they judge a rebooking is the best outcome. The trouble is that this team appears to have a weak grasp of how flights can be both very late and arrive early, and having pushed people on to later flights, they are not able to be nimble in the other direction back on to their flights if it turns out to be unnecessary. They appear to be paid to do one thing only, make a flight viable, and there's nothing in it for them to deal with minor considerations such as passenger convenience or even straightforward maintenance to viable and contracted bookings. Part of this is that BA gets in the neck if there are mass irrops and is unable to deal with hundreds of missed connections when people airside can just "go home and ring BA". There is very clear consumer protection in this space, and it's very important that passengers use these protections, even though BA will initially argue that the delay meant that the connection could not be made, and will even blame HAL for conformance issues here, even though many of these sorts of issues relate to connections well over conformance.

I had 2 personal examples recently. I had a JFK-LHR-NCL route recently, except I was on a separate ticket to Newcastle (and being in CE I could flex it between the 5 flights that day). My colleague - GGL - did the sensible thing and bought a through ticket. And you can guess what happened - the flight was at one point 45 minutes late, but arrived under 5 minutes late. We had 1 hour 20 minutes to make the connection, my boarding pass was accepted - well below conformance - my colleague, on identical flights, was not. Moreover he got stuck in the no-mans land between the UK Border and the Common Travel area gates with no-one from BA on duty. I made a few phone calls and someone from the Concorde team rescued him and the situation. The CT member said it was happening more often than he liked at the moment.

The second one was a ultra cheap ORD-LHR-DUB fare, when I got the First Wing, well over an hour to go, "flight cancelled", and I had been rebooked to the next service. Well it wasn't cancelled, I walked past the original DUB gate and the ground staff hadn't even arrived. Therefore I was the very first passenger at the gate. Now in that case I just put in for an involuntary refund, more to see what would happen. Two weeks on, no refund yet. In that case we arrived 10 minutes early, but had at one point been 40 minutes late, the Jetstream doing the necessary there.

The main protection in this space - which would apply if you can get to the gate (which is a T3 aspect) - is my favourite CJEU case of Germ�n Rodr�guez Cachafeiro, Mar�a de los Reyes Mart�nez-Reboredo Varela-Villamor versus Iberia, L�neas A�reas de Espa�a SA. The circumstances were very similar to the cases above, and in essence if you can make the flight before the doors shut then IDB is payable, pretty much strict liability. So uo to �520 per person. It's important to claim this in order to persuade BA that there is a business case for being more nimble. You also don't have to accept BA's hotel (etc), you can book your own. For T5 conformance can get in the way, but I would urge anyone who is rebooked - typically automatically via the App - to go the original gate and ask to be put back on the flight. If they say "no", as they are bound to do, then IDB is payable. You could take a selfie at the gate but I've never heard of a situation where that would be necessary.

Flight Control are the ones who can over-ride WNS' efforts, they generally say no since it's effort and may mean bouncing staff standbys. It's not a revenue management issue, indeed that team would probably be quite keen to avoid the avoidable expense.

That isn't the case, they would do exactly the same if the nixed flight was half empty and several nights in a hotel would ensue. WNS are a Business Process Management team, their only role is to mechanically work to an SOP, BA have outsourced their customer relations and shareholder interest in one fell swoop, but if you don't have enough staff to handle 200 irrops, what do you do?

Confus

WNS are no longer involved in any of this, the process has been insourced to a team at CallBA (so are 100% direct BA employees). The rest is accurate though, very little is automated but it�s all based on standard process time and the team can�t/don�t make human judgements about whether conditions on the day mean connections are more or less likely to be made.

To the OP, yes �mates rates� would apply, you�ll have been booked under IATA regulations covering on-the-day disruption.

raghu

Last month, had a 100 minute scheduled connection for T5 to T3, for BLR-LHR-MIA, business class.
The second flight was AA, so from T3.
By the time the doors opened, it was down to 70 minutes - and the BA crew told me to "run" and that I would make it.
So I arrive at the AA gate in T3 about 35 minutes before departure, but the gate agent said BA had automatically rebooked me on LHR-LAX-MIA
(and, with a tight connection at LAX of just 94 minutes, given MCT of 90 minutes there.)
Not sure why the BA crew did not tell that to me before I went as fast as I could to T3.

It took a resourceful AA gate agent to make a call, and put me on the last business class seat for the flight (since my seat had already been given away to someone else).
I was the last to board - but made it, and slept much better than I had on some prior flights!

Now, I am a bit concerned about a tight connection at LHR next week (BLR-LHR-MIA, on BA, ticket by AA, business class).
Connection time right now is 70 minutes, and inbound has been delayed many days in recent weeks so that by the time the aircraft gate opens time available will be less than MCT of 60 minutes.
The only choice available, in case of a missed connection, that does not involve an overnight hotel stay in London or elsewhere, is again the LHR-LAX-MIA option, again with 94 minutes connection at LAX for a 11:59 PM departure from LAX.

So I called BA in Delhi today - and the first agent flat out lied and said I have to contact AA in case of a delayed arrival at LHR, since AA issued the ticket.
I hanged up and called again, and this time the second agent said there is no way to pro-actively make a notation that in case of a delay the customer does not want LHR-LAX-MIA and would prefer to stay overnight in LHR.

Is it really the case that such notations will not done by BA?
If true, that can be a suggestion for improvement.