As an American, I'm not an expert on faffing, but getting sent home from the gate to try again another day (after having traveled to the airport, gone through security and immigration, etc) seems like more faffing than making a single connection that is very close to the final destination.

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Reasonable means ~£200 a night, or whatever is showing locally as a sort of sensible price. So you wouldn't book a £600 a night hotel when £350 is showing as available elsewhere but £350 would be ok. And food without booze and keep the receipts.

There will be a chunk of compensation too, but that's additional.

I would amplify the advice to try to check in as soon as possible to grab a seat. A free night is ok but a couple of free nights and my sense of humour would start glitching and I'd be looking for re-routing. On no account cancel the flights to rebook, that lets BA off the hook.

I agree, and applied gentle pressure, however I am more aware of my rights and am more assured about how to handle disruption (in no small part thanks to the help on this forum)

For them, they essentially trusted what they were told by the check in staff, that they were “promised” a seat on the ‘42.

That rang alarm bells for me because of the load and unfortunately turned out to be correct.

BA is still selling at least two seats in economy on tomorrow's BA58 on BA.com, so they should at least be able to get a confirmed booking on that if they can speak to someone quickly.

Whether that translates into actual seats onboard is of course a different question.

Ethiopian Airlines have two flights from Cape Town to Addis Ababa tomorrow leaving at 13:50 and 15:20, arriving at 21:15 and 22:45 respectively.

Flight from Addis leaves at 01:05 and gets to Heathrow at 06:35.

Well, REVMAN has ballsed that up spectacularly tonight. Which is unusual, it must be said.

Maybe, maybe not. If they sold a ticket for £1k one way yesterday, then after paying the OP's friend £520 plus the accommodation, they're still making perhaps £250 pure profit.

Hopefully they get sorted, not a nice situation especially for non frequent flyers.

I really hope there is no problem with their employers, understanding it might be inconvenient. Any employer who has a problem with this situation is not worth working for, but I realise not everyone is in a privileged position to make that choice.

Lighthearted question, is there any job worth 12 hours on Condor. I saw 5 colleagues come off FRA-LAS in Y a few years ago and I’m not sure they’ve ever recovered. Not helped by the fact me and another colleague were ungraded to the upper deck of the 747. I wrote performance reviews on that flight, a definite correlation to better performance that year!

Visitors to SA have four weeks left to renew visas (thesouthafrican.com) Flights departing SA likely to be busy until end of month

Hypothetically speaking and purely because I find this such an interesting subject (although easy to say when I’m not the one experiencing the stress of this) but should BA find themselves in this position tomorrow would they then take people of off tomorrow’s flight to accommodate those bumped from todays?

I am afraid I see no guarantees here, but if check-in tomorrow does not give a seat number on the boarding pass, then you invite them, or call up, to rebook via another route. ET indeed looks good, I guess there's a big advantage in planning to be at check-in the moment it opens, purely to allow more flights. MMB should give the time of that opening. Also make sure they have some sort of VOIP access on their phones (such as Skype) and the BA telephone numbers. But otherwise, it's probably important for them to enjoy one evening and a morning in Cape Town, it doesn't do to get too worked up about this.

Staff, 100%. Customers, possibly. As I said, the first flight is oversold, the second has 1 seat as of now.

I had a quick look for tomorrow, just out of interest and a one way in Economy is £570. The next day (Wed) was nearly double that so maybe Wednesday is very very busy? I don't know if it works like that?

With respect it’s rather uncomfortable talking about a stressful, agonising situation like this and boiling it down to how it’s lining BAs pocket. It might well be the case but I think the focus should remain on helping the passengers rather than being armchair shareholders and seeing how much money can be made out of someone’s misery. There could be all sorts of repercussions to the people involved including work, family commitments etc and clearly they are not out of the woods.

Don’t know if things have been changed (unlikely) but seats would usually be held on next flight even if that is also oversold. Flight management team clearly did that tonight but didn’t hold enough seats on the second flight so they then had to move people to tomorrow.

Staff at CPT should have checked in customers onto tomorrow’s flights or flight management team may have transferred them over. When I was at LHR, customers were moved to next day, we’d usually give then their boarding pass along with hotel accommodation.