Had a scare this morning when checking my BAEC account. An upcoming First Class reward flight was no longer showing in MMB.

Hubby checked the HHA and lo and behold BA have bumped us down to CW for the return flight and we hadn't been informed of this. Not good.

A quick dummy booking shows no first availability on the return date (nor the outbound) so I assumed that there has been an aircraft change from a 4 to 3 class aircraft. Flight details are LGW to UVF out 21/01/16, return 04/02/16, and of course there is now no first reward availability on dates near 4th Feb.

I wonder if/when BA were going to inform us (and refund the Avios balance.....) and why remove the entire booking from MMB?

Anyway, a quick call to Your First and indeed they confirmed the aircraft change. A short time on hold and the lovely lady came back and said that we could either accept the change and fly back on 4th or that she would open up reward availability for 2 x first class seats on 3rd Feb. as neither of us have flown first class before we took the return flight on the 3rd. Yes it's a day less in St Lucia but for me, that's a good compromise to be able to fly first class on the return. We have window seats on the outbound and wanted to try the centre pair for the return.

So big thumbs up to BA for a good service recovery after what for me was a very disappointing experience.

However, why oh why can't BA send an email stating that the booking had been changed, it can't be that difficult, surely......

And finally, I wonder how many more aircraft changes there will be, between now and then, that we won't be informed about?

Lesson learned, check MMB more often!

It's really frustrating when BA do this. But - you can "protect" yourself. Download the "My Flights" app and it'll send you a notification if your seat gets changed (as it would have done here).

Thanks Paul4040, I shall do that now!

Award Wallet was/ is still showing the original flights.

We had similar. Flights in f from kuala lumpur booked.noticed that connectioning flights showing as a day later. Looked into it and original flight had moved forward 2 hours and just into another day. So rather than moving us forward 2 hours they moved us back 22.they left the connecting flights so we would have been 31 hours at heathrow. .

We hadn't bennotified. Called another opened up 2 f on the laterflightwhichmeant the connecting flights were still ok.

I wouldn't personally call losing a day of your holiday and flying in the cabin you originally booked particularly good service recovery - that seems to be the absolute bare minimum to me!

Yes, I see your point! But considering the palpitations that I was having this morning at the thought of CW when I was really really looking forward to F (first world problem I know) this is a good outcome for me

If, between now and the flight, BA reinstate the 4 class aircraft on our original date then that will be a different matter!!

Good service differs between different people. I'd call it good service as does the OP but others would say it isn't.

Enjoy the holiday and the service on the way back Hope you like LPGS

100% with Callum on this one - there's no way I'd want to lose a day of holiday just to fly in first. But you seem very happy so that's all that matters in this case, and at least BA were willing to open up a couple of seats for you

While I find the idea of losing a day of holiday to fly in First instead of Club World bizarre (unless you're some kind of plane aficionado and the flight itself is the purpose of the holiday, not the island), that's not what I meant.

I meant that all BA have done is cut a day off your holiday and accommodated you in the cabin you booked and paid for. How on Earth that can be described as particularly good service I have no idea!

Use the My Flights app and it checks for you so you'll get notified pretty much immediately if anything changes.

I have made many schedule changes in my airline career and I am pretty sure that at some point you would have been sent an email.

When changing schedules you tend to do many different changes in one go. You set up in the reservation system how passengers are going to move as a set of automated business rules with some rules a higher priority and with the lower priority being the less desirable moves. For example 1) Move to next flight 2) Move to even later flight 3) Move to earlier flight. 2 occurs if the next flight is full and 3 occurs if the next two flights are full but the number of people affected by 3 is much less but of course there is always someone.

When all that is done you could have affected 10s or 100s of thousands of people. The reason you don't always get an email as soon as your booking has changed is due to volume. Imagine if 100,000 people received an email about a flight change at the same time, how many of those 100,000 would immediately pick the phone up and called the contact centre? That would be disastrous (I have seen this happen). Therefore the emails tend to be batched in date order and sent out over time in order to manage the volume of communications towards the airline.

Hope this helps.

I'm absolutely convinced that BA will not have sent the OP an email.

This is not a schedule change. This was a change of equipment involving a downgrade and seat change. I'm afraid BA, to their discredit, doesn't send out emails when that happens. It's well documented here.

Schedule changes include aircraft swaps as the aircraft type is part of the schedule. You can even isolate a list of passengers who were affected by downgrades, seat number changes or even seat property changes (leg room).

Anyway, I am sorry, I was just trying to give people some background of the processes that take place. It is not some human that individually changed the PNR and decided not to send the email.

I agree it is merely a very standard offer in the case of a booking disruption due to the airline. That said, I am not too sure what else reservations could have done bar offering a refund or the difference or a rebooking on another day when the original travel class was available.

Although it seems wrong to lose a day of your holiday to fly F, I do the converse all the time. I book my holiday to suit the availability of flights that I want.

A day lost here is a day gained there.