Were you affected by British Airways’ IT failure?

This was a débâcle of epic proportions. In this day and age how could an organisation that relies on computer systems totally not have some sort of tested backup plan in place? And it’s always the same story: lack of information. Why were passengers not given up to date information? Why were the PA systems not deployed to full effect? Why has the MD not resigned? If this were a government department a minister would probably have gone by now.

The CEO has claimed a ‘power surge’ was to blame. Must have been one almighty surge to take out all the data processing centres simultaneously.

Not having a working backup system is unbelievable.

Luggage not travelling with passengers is also unacceptable. Surely they could have found a way for passengers to take their luggage to planes and get it manually loaded?

I myself was not affected by the BA computer failure over the Bank Holiday, but to blame a power failure for the computers to be “Down” is a bit “Far Fetched”. Think about it for a minute are BA telling their customers that every passenger is tied to a centrally located computer system?

Last year in August 2016, I was travelling from Chicago back to the UK, I checked in “On-line” and was allocated a particular gate at O’Hare Airport the international departure airport to the UK.
When I went to the “Baggage Drop” I was told that I would have to be be “re-checked” in as they were having problems in integrating a major Software Update. I would suspect that this was not a power problem but a Major “Software integration” problem.

I was unfortunately a victim of last weekend’s BA saga, being stranded in Oslo, Norway, after visiting friends. My return flight was at 11.35 on Sunday 28th, but I discovered it had been cancelled a couple of hours beforehand. Rebooked onto 17:15, cancelled, rebooked onto 21:15, cancelled. Rebooked onto 07:45 on Monday 29th, cancelled! During this time, I was given just one voucher for 115 NOK which didn’t even cover the cost of a coffee and sandwich from Starbucks! Despite other flights departing during the day on Monday, BA would only offer me the 21:15 flight. I was, by this time, tired, hungry, broke and in pain because my medication for a chronic illness had run out, so I booked a flight home with SAS on Monday afternoon. I have put in a claim to BA, but I think I’ll be lucky to receive anything as BA told me to claim on insurance, and insurance company told me to claim from BA 🙁
It seems BA does not want to take responsibility for what had happened when it was clearly their fault!!

I flew in to Heathrow at 2pm on Saturday after a 10 1/2 hour flight from San Francisco only to have to sit on the plane for over 3 hours as the airport was full, we then where ushered through passport control so could not talk to anyone from BA before we got land side, we then spent nearly an hour trying to find out what was happening re rescheduled flight, suitcases etc, we were told that we would not get out cases and where given a sheet of paper to say what we could claim, I tried to explain that I have a heart condition and my medication was in the case that I could not get (case finally arrived on the Thursday, 5 days after we arrived), I was told there was nothing they could do. We then stood in a queue for another 3 hours to try and get somewhere to sleep that night, I will not go in to the debacle that was “we know London.com” caused, we then finally got an hotel booked at 11.30pm, in central London, it was the cheapest hotel we could get that had rooms, the cost was £344, I have just had an email from BA to say, in their words “Which appear in excess of the reasonable costs expected for a journey of that nature” and have only been offered the standard £200, which I believe is an insult as BA did nothing to help me get a hotel, in fact we were told to call at 6am the following morning or go on to the website to “change our booking ” to get on a new flight, at 6am no one was answering their phones and I could not rearrange a new flight on their website, which stated, “do not travel to the airport unless you had a confirmed flight”, which as they were not answering their phones and their website was not working and I could not get my medication, how could we get a confirmed flight? then we had no option but to spend more money on a train home. i’m sure there will be a debate over the cost of the train in the coming days. All in all this was a problem caused by BA which had the knock on effect that hotels raised their prices but I am having to pay money out of my own pocket. Sorry for this long winded but I am so angry with BA, its not the £144 I am out of pocket but the principle that it is being suggested that it was MY FAULT that I paid too much for the hotel.
PS there was not one announcement by BA at the airport to let anyone know what was happening.

For all those who were affected by the BA IT failure, we’ve launched a brand new way for you to get your message across the airline chief, Alex Cruz. If you have a story about a delayed or cancelled flight with British Airways and want to support our call for automatic compensation, click hear and start writing a postcard to the airline: http://www.which.co.uk/bapostcard