Dear Tripped Up,
We are two active and nimble senior citizens who last May — at ages 79 and 82 — set out from Los Angeles to Athens on a two-leg British Airways itinerary in business class with a connection at London Heathrow Airport. Our first flight was delayed about an hour, but despite having to deplane via stairs and take a bus to the terminal rather than use the normal jet bridge, we still hustled through international arrivals and security and made it to our departure gate at 11:25 a.m., five minutes before our boarding pass said it would close. Even so, we were denied boarding, told our seats had been filled and put on a much later flight to Athens, arriving after 1 a.m. I filed a complaint with the airline, but the representative responded nonsensically that we hadn’t made the connection (even though we arrived at the gate on time), and that our total delay was only 57 minutes, not enough to qualify for compensation (even though we got to Athens over seven hours late). Should British Airways compensate us? And what are the rules about flight connections and gate-closing times? Can you help? David and Valerie, Claremont, Calif.
Dear David and Valerie,
Let’s start with the easy part. British Airways not only should, but must, pay each of you 520 pounds — just over $700 — under a British consumer protection law protecting air travelers, informally known as UK261.
Now brace yourself for the rest: The airline refused to let you board your connecting flight not because of rules about connections or gate-closing times, but because it gave away your seats hours earlier, when you were still in the air — or maybe even before you left Los Angeles.
In other words, your mad rush through the terminal was all for naught. And vexingly, the airline most likely did it at least in part for your own good.
First, I’ll help with the cash, and then I’ll explain the rest.
You forwarded me the responses British Airways sent you denying compensation, which I agree do not make sense. I contacted British Airways, and, soon after, you received a message from a customer relations representative named Wendy Epperson offering “sincere apologies for the disruption” and acknowledging you were eligible for payment under the law. You told me you have now received the £1,040 you should have been paid long ago.
Before domestic travelers get their hopes up, the United States has no comparable law. Though bills modeled in part after UK261 and its European Union counterpart, EU261, were introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in December, they are not exactly blazing a trail through Congress.
Now the hard part: Why did British Airways give away your seats long before your heroic hustle to the gate?
A spokeswoman for the airline declined to answer my specific questions, but I have a pretty good idea of what might have happened thanks to Ms. Epperson’s email, some reading I did about airline operations and a phone interview with Vikrant Vaze, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth who has studied such operations for almost two decades.
Airlines have excellent tools to help them make decisions, Professor Vaze said. But they can’t know everything, including, say, how active and nimble a particular pair of passengers are or how long lines are in the terminal.
British Airways would have known your connection was at risk by the time your plane took off late from Los Angeles International Airport the previous afternoon. If the airline had held your original seats on the London-to-Athens leg until the gates closed and only after that had looked for seats on a replacement flight, it’s possible all the remaining flights to Athens that day would have been full, and you could have been stuck in London for a night or more. That would have made both you and the airline very unhappy — you’d have lost a chunk of your trip, and British Airways would have most likely had to fly with two empty business class seats, pay a premium for your last-minute hotel room, and cover your meals and transportation.
So, for the airline, bumping you to a later flight may have been the best solution, even if, in this case, it worked out worse for you.
Lots of variables could have factored into the decision. Perhaps the terminal was less crowded or the airspace above Heathrow was less congested than usual, unexpectedly giving you more connection time. Perhaps someone (or some system) noticed as you were taking off from Los Angeles that there were so few seats left on later London-to-Athens flights that it made sense to get you on one of them. Maybe other Athens-bound passengers had also missed their flights. Airlines have to balance a number of competing interests.
“To their credit, they’re moving in a very fast-moving, dynamic environment,” Professor Vaze said.
Ms. Epperson’s email doesn’t provide details, but it does give the reasoning behind the change. “Our Flight Connections team monitors late inbound flights,” she wrote, “and proactively rebooks affected customers to ensure they’re protected on a later flight, avoiding potential overnight delays.”
But her next line is surprising: “In your case,” she wrote, British Airways “should have rebooked you on a backup flight without removing you from your original booking.”
If British Airways’ policy is to reserve seats on a later flight while holding them on the current flight until the last second for every customer with a tight connection, that’s a very customer-friendly stance.
But she did say “in your case,” and Professor Vaze told me that passenger status and cabin can matter in such situations, so I wrote back to you to ask about that. It turns out you have Platinum Pro (David) and Platinum (Valerie) status on American, a British Airways partner, and of course you were in business class. So if anyone was eligible for special treatment here, it might have been you.
That is just speculation, of course, but one thing is sure: As soon as you turned on your phone in London, you should have had emails and text messages waiting for you, informing you of the rebooking. It wouldn’t have spared you the outrage, but it would have spared you that impressive but ultimately useless sprint to the gate.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
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Seth Kugel is the columnist for “Tripped Up,” an advice column that helps readers navigate the often confusing world of travel.
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