May Bank Holiday Chaos: How To Claim Against British Airways
Monday, May 29th, 2017 in Airlines, News
It’s been a nightmare weekend for British Airways. On Friday, a power outage led to mass cancellations and flight delays from Heathrow and Gatwick. Factor in the heatwave and the Bank Holiday, and you have a perfect storm of rightly frustrated passengers. Let’s look at what caused the situation and how you can claim compensation against British Airways for missed flights.
What Happened?
The official line from British Airways is that a power cut caused a mass shutdown in their IT data centre. The details of how this caused the delays are uncertain, but two likely theories are:
1. Total Power Outage
The IT failure caused a total loss of passenger and flight data, meaning that customer helpdesks had literally no records to refer to. For all the benefits of technology, this makes it clear as to how heavily we depend on digital records.
2. Unsynchronised Records
The power outage caused all passenger and flight data to become unsynchronised i.e. flight information was available, but it was unclear as to who, when or what each set of records referred to. Multiply that by the hundreds of flights and thousands of customers, and you can see how this caused such chaos.
How Can I Claim Compensation From BA?
Many passengers will be contacted directly by British Airways to compensate them on their delayed journeys. Others will have push harder to claim compensation, particularly if no action is taken in the coming months. Receiving compensation is your right, but BA are not obliged to pay unless you approach them first.
The best and fastest way to make a claim is via legal experts. They’ll contact the airline on your behalf and help secure your compensation with the weight of a professional legal body. Remember, you could be owed up to £500 for the Bank Holiday chaos, so it’s well worth getting started.
