Parental Missed Flight Mayhem

Bit of an emergency which i would be massively grateful for any advice on.

My folks are in Tampa at the moment and have (on separate PNRs) booked Jetblue from TPA-EWR today (23rd) but only realised when i tried to do OLCI that they had accidentally booked themselves on BA186 EWR-LHR on 22nd, arriving 23rd.

This means that they've missed their long haul flight out of NYC. I belive it's an avios 2-4-1 booking in club.

They were told by BA that their existing ticket is 'dead', and it'd be £900 each for economy one-way on tonight's 186. In the end, they've booked new tickets in Y with Avios on tonights BA2166 from TPA-LGW.

I suppose that's the end of the matter. I just feel so awful for them as they don't often get to fly CW, it's a real treat and they enjoyed LHR-DEN on the outbound.

I must admit that although 'rules is rules' I am very disappointed with how BA has dealt with this. They haven't offered any hope of even reactivating the ticket for a fee. Is there any advice on how they could pursue it with BA or is it best just to give up and move on?

Thanks for any advice.

I hate the 'rules are rules' line that airlines hide behind, as they make the rules! Yet, in some cases there are good reasons for those rules.

It will really depend on the final load factor of the flight.

If it was full you may be able to argue that BA were able to resell the seats.

As the seat is perishable, once that flight has departed BA cannot make any more money from it. So it's not possible for thme to resell the seats.

Yet, you might get a refund of the tax...

So sorry to hear this -- I saw your thread on flyertalk this morning and just brought myself up to speed.

To be honest I don't think they have much chance of getting anything out of BA. They could try calling (or perhaps a good letter to Head Office would be better), but as soon as they are home in the UK the urgency of their plight recedes.

You mentioned the VS reactivation fee and I am not sure if this is correct with respect to reward bookings -- would be interesting to get the opinion of an expert here. It is true that if you no-show for many inflexible revenue tickets you can rebook, at a cost + plus fare differences, onto new flights up to 1 year after the original departure. This is also true of BA. But whether it applies to redemption bookings on VS, I don't know.

[honey lamb]

I know it's a different airline but the principle is the same but I asked Aer John to book me on a ORK-AMS flight to connect with a BA ex-AMS to Buenos Aires. He did so but unfortunately I gave him to wrong return date. Aer John works for EI in Finance but could he change it? Nope! All I could do was book a single ORK-AMS and claim back the taxes on the wrong date.*

*And if anyone is wondering why I'm not terminating my return from Buenos Aires at LHR and booking a LHR-ORK leg, there is anecdotal evidence that BA has cancelled miles and tier points on anyone doing this unless they can provide evidence as to why they did not take the final leg and in any case, the AMS flight gets into ORK only a couple of hours after the LHR one - always supposing that one is on time

Definitely have them claim the taxes back. Missed segments usually do have a rather dramatic impact on your ticket (generally results in automatic cancellation of ticket), although this is in reality less dramatic that BA would want us to think.

As with many other things (like stand-bys etc) US airlines seem to be more flexible with this than BA, still I have to say by all accounts it's not easy to re-use a ticket that's been cancelled, one reason why US airlines are always futzing with my ticket if I get stuck in some kind of delay and look like missing a connection. They call it a pro-active rebooking, I called them all sorts of names when I got to my flight with seconds to spare once and they didn't want to let me on

Could this be covered by credit card insurance if booked by CC?

Complete shot in the dark.