May 26th - What rights you have if your flight gets cancelled
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My flight at Heathrow, to Prague, has just been cancelled – along with almost 200 other departures since the latest British Airways IT meltdown began. From the airport, here's my take on what's been happening and your (and, on this occasion, my) rights.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I'm speaking to you from the Old Town Square in Prague, where the sun is gently setting and I'm enjoying a cold pilsner beer. |
| 0:16.6 | Actually, that's not true at all. I'm having a coffee at Heathrow due to the cancellation of my flight, |
| 0:23.6 | which is, as you can imagine, slightly annoying. |
| 0:27.6 | Having said that, British Airways, which is having this massive computer glitch, |
| 0:33.6 | it says that it will be able to get me to Prague tonight. |
| 0:36.6 | I'm not telling out complete hope, |
| 0:39.3 | but there appears to be a plan for the flight to go there. I just wanted to look at the whole |
| 0:44.8 | miserable experience that so many people have had as a result of this latest IT meltdown. |
| 0:52.1 | Cancellations now pretty much at 200 British Airways flights in, I guess, |
| 0:58.5 | about 30 hours since around lunchtime on Thursday, the IT failure began to manifest itself. This was |
| 1:07.0 | nothing like the same scale as the overwhelming closed down of British Airways in May |
| 1:14.1 | 2017 exactly the same weekend started the bank holiday start of half term for millions of families |
| 1:20.4 | and on that occasion they shut down the whole Heathrow and Gatwick operations and it was miserable. This is miserable for a lot of |
| 1:30.3 | people. It's not just people like me who are going on a so-called point-to-point trip getting to Prague. |
| 1:36.2 | And yes, I have been looking at the alternatives tomorrow and there's very, very few of them. |
| 1:40.6 | It's actually much more salient for people who are due to be transferring. So, for instance, |
| 1:47.3 | they've just cancelled the latest round of flights from British airways to mostly domestic ones. |
| 1:54.7 | What have we got here? Yeah, latest fallers, Aberdeen, Belfast, Edinburgh, Manchester, Newcastle, |
| 1:59.6 | and they've also thrown in Venice, Stuttgart, and Zurich, as well as my flight to Prague. |
| 2:05.6 | And what they seem to be doing is saying, right, we are going to get everything in order by the time Saturday morning rolls around there. |
| 2:14.6 | Effectively, I'm sorry to use a computer analogy pressing the reset button |
| 2:19.0 | so that everybody is in place it's still going to be late it's still going to be messy so for instance |
... |
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