Simon's dispatches
With a British Airways booking from LHR to Prague on Friday, I had some skin in the game – and a grandstand seat for each batch of cancelled flights. I calculate that 200 BA departures were grounded as a result of the technical failure, affecting 30,000 passengers. My teatime trip to the Czech capital was added to the "red list" of cancelled flights at around 3pm.
Being a solo traveller appears to have helped: I was last to squeeze on board a later flight – the final departure of the evening – and reached my hotel after midnight. (According to the latest airline assessment by Which?, it serves me right for booking with "a thoroughly mediocre airline".)
While I flew to Prague, stories began to emerge of another, unrelated IT failure hitting travellers to the UK. Anyone whose flight to Heathrow wasn't cancelled discovered an hours-long line for passport control. All the eGates that normally allow swift access for the majority of arrivals failed.
The whole UK Border Force business model – including staffing last weekend – is based on the premise that a large majority of arriving passengers (typically 70 per cent) are able to use the eGates. As well as British citizens, EU nationals, Americans, Australians, Japanese and other nationalities can go through them, so long as a child under 12 is not in the party.
Checking that a passport is valid, that it belongs to the traveller presenting themselves, and that they are not wanted by Interpol is a transaction that is normally easily and efficiently achieved by eGate technology. Manual checks for all drastically increases the processing time – leading to extreme queues at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and other leading UK airports.
You might conclude from the weekend's chaos that civilised travel is unravelling – and/or that my colleague Helen Coffey was wise to use coaches and trains for her journey to and from southern Spain last week. Both British Airways and the Home Office know they need urgently to work out what went wrong and how to minimise the chances of a repeat. But most airline passengers reached their destinations and, I hope, enjoyed a rewarding journey that made the miles worthwhile.
When aviation goes wrong, as it seems frequently to do, the key is to understand your rights. Ignore any offer from the airline to refund your fare, unless that is the best option for you. Most of us need a replacement flight (or, depending on the journey, a train), which should be organised and paid for by the airline that cancelled the flight.
Importantly, ignore nonsense from the carrier such as: "Sorry, your flight to Rome is cancelled and the next available seat is in two days." If any airline has space on the same day as you were originally planning to travel, the cancelling carrier must pay for that ticket – as well as for an overnight stay and meals if required. And if the airline is at fault, you are due cash compensation.
The affected British Airways passengers are, I estimate, owed around £8m. But that is small change: BA's parent company, IAG, predicts full-year profits above €2bn (£1.75bn).
Your flight rights when things go wrong
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.