To celebrate my 60th birthday, we used an inheritance to book flights from Glasgow to Mexico City via Heathrow, where our son was to join us.
We worried that the transfer time of 90 minutes at Heathrow would be tight, given that there had been storms that week, so in the end, my husband, daughter and I instead took a train from Glasgow the night before.
But when we showed our boarding passes at security, we were informed that, as three of us had not taken the Glasgow flight, our tickets were now invalid, including the return leg. Since our son’s flight originated in London, he was unaffected.
We were left with a desperate decision to make: should we send our student son alone to Mexico and buy new return flights at twice the original price, or give up our trip. In the end we maxed out our credit cards to spend a further £9,000 on new tickets.
We were forced to fly the following day as we were told there was no availability on our original flight, despite the fact that my son travelled with three empty seats behind him. BA’s wordy e-ticket confirmation does not mention the consequences of missing a leg. SA, Glasgow
This is an extreme example of clandestine “no-show” clauses operated by many airlines. The clause, buried in the conditions of carriage that few of us bother to study, allows airlines to cancel the remaining tickets for a journey if a passenger misses a leg.
The rationale is to prevent passengers taking advantage of discounted fares on certain routes without intending to complete the full itinerary.
Successive EU courts have ruled that the practice is in potential breach of contract law, and the UK regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, has deemed it “disproportionate” and inadequately publicised. Its review of airline contract terms report in 2019 concluded that tickets should only be invalidated by a no-show if the passenger was clearly trying to game the pricing system, and that those who miss the first leg of a journey for legitimate reasons should have their tickets reinstated.
BA told me that all passengers are required to confirm they have read the conditions of carriage when booking. I have read and reread them and find them perplexingly worded and potentially misleading. Essentially, they state (in my simplified translation) that if you miss a leg of your journey, whether or not you inform BA, and the route you end up taking would have cost more, you must pay the difference to keep your booking. And if it ends up costing less, you will be refunded the difference.
What the conditions do not say is that the rest of your tickets will be automatically invalidated if you don’t fly on one leg and you will have to buy new ones. When I put this to BA, it referred me to its FAQ page.
This, in contrast to the conditions of carriage, does baldly state that no-shows lose the whole journey.
Passengers are not asked to confirm they have read the FAQs, and requirements that are not in the conditions of carriage do not form part of a contract. BA dug in and claimed that since you did not notify it in advance that you were forgoing the Glasgow flight, it was unable to calculate a revised fare, so you had to buy new tickets.
To back up its stance, it referred me back to those T&Cs, which unequivocally state that unannounced no-shows will have the cost of their fare recalculated to reflect the altered route.
It seems that BA finds its own small print as confusing as I do. The airline wouldn’t comment on why it told you your original flight was sold out when your booked seats were unoccupied, or on the CAA’s view that automatic no-show cancellations are unfair.
I think you have a good case to put to the complaints handling body the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR).
Shining a light on a firm’s Christmas cheer
For the sake of my blood pressure, I need to know there are companies that have a heart.
“Santa put a Ledlenser kid’s head torch in my son’s stocking last Christmas,” writes SB from West Yorkshire. “It broke, so I contacted Ledlenser. They sent a replacement along with a note to my son from Santa blaming a ‘little hiccup’ in his north pole workshop. My son was blown away and it made me feel so emotional that Ledlenser helped me to keep the magic going.”
