British Airways ‘refuse to pay back families who booked new tickets on other airlines’
Faced with massive queues at the airport and call centre, thousands of passengers bought tickets with other airlines
BRITISH Airways has told stranded passengers who desperately booked trips with other airlines to reach their destination this weekend that they won't refund them for the fares after a massive IT meltdown at Gatwick and Heathrow Airports, it has been claimed.
The airline's check-in and operational systems crash - which hit 200,000 passengers trying to travel on the Bank Holiday weekend - is set to cost the company £300million in compensation.
BA is reportedly telling passengers: “If we weren't able to offer a suitable alternative flight we would offer a full refund of any unused sectors on your booking with us, but any alternative flights booked via different carriers would be at your own expense and would have to be claimed back through travel insurance.”
This comes as many passengers complained about long waits at the airport or trying to contact the call centre.
Mark Dillingham, who spent £1,000 on new flights on Lufthansa, told The Independent: “Do we lose this money even though British Airways was uncontactable?
"We couldn't enter the terminal, and the phone lines were shut.”
When approached for a comment on reimbursing passengers' tickets with other airlines, BA said: "We would ask our customers to get in touch with us directly via our Manage My Booking tool on or our contact centres so that we can re-book or re-route them to their destination as quickly and easily as possible."
Boss Alex Cruz has been blamed for the disaster by GMB union bosses, as it was claimed "inexperienced staff in India didn’t know how to kick-start the airline’s back-up system"
The chief executive, who founded budget carrier Clickair and ran airline Vueling before moving to work for British Airways in 2016, has been accused of replacing British IT professionals with cheap overseas workers since taking the role.
Despite initial reports from passengers that the disruptions had been caused by a cyber attack, BA has said that a "power supply issue" was most likely behind the global IT failure.
Chief executive Cruz said: "We believe the root cause was a power supply issue and we have no evidence of any cyber attack."
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