Qantas denied boarding, BA rebooked on another carrier -> no points

[RichardMEL]

Of course.

You know that. We know that.

But I don’t know if the average passenger knows that.

If you have a ticket booked through an airline and had boarding passes issued, I you might reasonably expect that airline to help you. And airlines don’t go out of their way to make understanding any easier. As you say… if anything happens before they day of travel they wash their hands of it.

I dunno. most stories of woe I see/hear about tend to be when pax complain to the operating carrier of the flight that has an issue (which makes perfect sense).

While it is true that probably your average passenger might be confused or wondering what to do in situation like this I still reckon 9/10 times the first instance is to ask the carrier concerned.

Of course rushing to the connecting gate and being denied boarding is a nasty shock. BA were proactive but perhaps not proactive enough to perhaps send a message to the CSM on the inbound flight to say "Those on the following flights have been rebooked and see our ground staff..." and that's probably the one fail in this situation

certainly I've had this happen on QF just a few months back flying a delayed LAX_SYD and I already knew from the CSM which flight I'd been rebooked on - which was very helpful given the lack of wifi on those international services.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

I dunno. most stories of woe I see/hear about tend to be when pax complain to the operating carrier of the flight that has an issue (which makes perfect sense).

While it is true that probably your average passenger might be confused or wondering what to do in situation like this I still reckon 9/10 times the first instance is to ask the carrier concerned.

Of course rushing to the connecting gate and being denied boarding is a nasty shock. BA were proactive but perhaps not proactive enough to perhaps send a message to the CSM on the inbound flight to say "Those on the following flights have been rebooked and see our ground staff..." and that's probably the one fail in this situation

certainly I've had this happen on QF just a few months back flying a delayed LAX_SYD and I already knew from the CSM which flight I'd been rebooked on - which was very helpful given the lack of wifi on those international services.

That’s right, and it just happened in this case that the issuing carrier and operating carrier were supposed to be QF.

While BA was proactive here, there was a lack of communication. I’m not sure passengers would understand why, if their connection was made in plenty of time, that they had been off loaded.

Plenty of times in the US there are very tight connections, even in HKG on CX, SQ in SIN or SYD with QF where you race to the gate… or are even escorted to the gate… to make that connection.

It seems to be an issue where connecting from one carrier to another that ‘being proactive’ can cause issues.

 

[madrooster]

Correct procedure in such a situation is for a ground agent to meet the flight on arrival and have the new onward boarding passes already printed to hand to the pax. The failure in this case is BA's - whilst they proactively rebooked the pax (good), they failed to notify the pax (bad). At LHR there's a oneworld global support team that can do this on BA's behalf or BA can do it themselves.

In such a scenario, QF can take back control of the coupons, by putting you back on their flight and reissuing the ticket again. It's likely they had enough happening that this was too much work to be doing at the gate last minute.

 

[RichardMEL]

imo that QF is the issuing agent is kind of irrelevant imo. When acting as an agent it doesn't really matter in this scenario who issued. webjet could have issued it.. if sold as a QF fare it would ticket on 081 stock, but again that's kind of irrelevant imo when it comes to this kind of situation.

Anyway yes the REAL problem, as I pointed out, is the communication by BA once the choice was made.

I do agree that with boarding underway agents wouldn't have time(and potentially not the training and/or authorisation) to deal with reissuing tickets and so on when they're trying to close a flight (and from their POV the OP was "protected" on SQ with their flight closing) so....

Again if BA did nothing, and the OP arrived 5 minutes after the flight was officially closed the situation would have been much worse. It's one of those delcate calls that BA made in good faith. Of course I FULLY understand the frustration - getting to the gate of a boarding flight and not being able to board, then relegated to bad seats on another airline - absolutely. I do have some real sympathy for the situation.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

imo that QF is the issuing agent is kind of irrelevant imo. When acting as an agent it doesn't really matter in this scenario who issued. webjet could have issued it.. if sold as a QF fare it would ticket on 081 stock, but again that's kind of irrelevant imo when it comes to this kind of situation.

Anyway yes the REAL problem, as I pointed out, is the communication by BA once the choice was made.

I do agree that with boarding underway agents wouldn't have time(and potentially not the training and/or authorisation) to deal with reissuing tickets and so on when they're trying to close a flight (and from their POV the OP was "protected" on SQ with their flight closing) so....

Again if BA did nothing, and the OP arrived 5 minutes after the flight was officially closed the situation would have been much worse. It's one of those delcate calls that BA made in good faith. Of course I FULLY understand the frustration - getting to the gate of a boarding flight and not being able to board, then relegated to bad seats on another airline - absolutely. I do have some real sympathy for the situation.

Im not sure it’s an agent situation here as it was a QF issued ticket for a QF flight. I didn’t realise it was possible for the tickets to be reinstated, which might have made the QF flight the following day a possibility.