Two Strike Or Twoflower

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Does Two Strikes Mean We're Not Out?

British Airways cabin crew union Unite is on it's second week of strike action. BA themselves is refusing to negotiate and is clearly looking to break the union's back. Both organisations seem happy to abuse the paying customers.

We're flying a combined ticket which has us on Qantas, British Airways, and Air France as code shares with BA being the airline who ticketed us. Interestingly though we have both a BA and a Qantas booking reference which are different codes.

I'm going to vent a little here on the chance that it helps others avoid my mistake. That mistake was I did not fully research the airlines we were travelling on in terms of their reliability before making the booking. Had I spent some time on it I would have found that BA was starting an industrial dispute with the union and that strikes were a definite possibility.

That said, at no time did BA give us warning that strikes could affect our flights before taking our money, despite them knowing it was a very strong possibility. They also were no cheaper than flying Qantas the whole trip, who did actually offer exactly the same itinery just different aircraft, so it's not like we were getting a great deal for the risk.

British Airways has been terrible to deal with over this as well with a lot of misinformation aimed at getting you to not cancel your flights. Let me explain what happened when I tried to do just that;

On the BA website under 'Manage My Booking' the page showing my booking reference with my flights has a header saying since my flight was possibly subject to disruption that I could "cancel for a full refund" and that I should contact my travel agent. Which is what I did. They contacted BA who told them that no I could not have a refund. So I rang BA myself;
menu option 1, yes I am a customer, option 2, yes I want to change a booking.
result = recorded message "sorry we're extremely busy and can't take your call" and it hangs up
menu option 1, yes I am a customer, option 3, general enquiry
result = same as before
menu option 1, yes I am a customer, option 1, I want to make a booking
result = phone is answered in 1 ring, no queue! ie. we only want to talk to you if you wish to give us your money, not take it back.
me: can I cancel my booking since it says so on their website and why did they tell my travel agent no I can't?
BA: let me check that....no, you can't cancel for a refund unless we cancel the flight first.
me: but the manage my booking webpage says in a red bordered box that yes I can.
BA: oh, let me check that..long wait...oh I see, well get your travel agent to print out that page and they can cancel your flight and apply for a full refund.
I ring my travel agent who informs me, if I do cancel, to be aware that they typically take 3 months to refund the fare!
However, in the time between me checking the website and contacting my travel agent BA made a change to the 'manage my booking' page and it now no longer says I can cancel - yes I do have a printout myself though.

As it stands now, they've been cancelling some LHR<>JFK flights that BA had previously listed as fully confirmed.

So, fingers crossed that our flight goes ahead. If it does, they've told us to expect a cold salad for meals.

If you haven't guessed, we'll not be flying BA ever again.




*Twoflower is a book character by the superb Terry Pratchett.

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