Wow, that’s incredibly generous. For £200 per day she can stay in a REALLY nice 5-star hotel.
Damn, now I wish I hadn’t been able to afford to get the train home. If I’d stayed, I’d be eating better than I am now at home!
That’s harsh. But there are tens of thousands of hotels in the London area, and with £200 a day, it should be pretty easy to find one. That would cover plenty of travel to get to a hotel anywhere in the London area, a night at a very good hotel, and a really nice meal, with plenty left over.
I am from Pakistan and so was the other guy. We need visas.
US visitors do not need a visa for the UK for a visit of less than three months.
I suspect the husband was let out eventually when it became clear that the matter would be longer than a few hours. My colleague was allowed out after IIRC three or four hours. Emergency visas can be issued by Immigration staff as necessary.
I was stuck at O’Hare for almost 48 hours once when the airport was closed due to a snowstorm. There were thousands of us there waiting for connecting flights, and hotel rooms simply weren’t an option.
Someone – maybe the Red Cross – handed out bottled water and sandwiches. One of the airlines put out huge boxes of those little bags of peanuts. Some people grumbled, but we tried to make the best of it.
Jeebus. I hope you’re going to post a fulsome apology in the Pit Thread. £200 will get you a very nice hotel room, and the Heathrow Travelodges are only about £50 a night. She’s got more than enough to pay for a room, all taxi fares, and good meals in good local restaurants.
The 200 GBP per day is incredibly generous for a situation that is after all out of BA’s actual control.
If they are giving all passengers the same largesse, that’s got to be a HUGE chunk of change out of the company coffers.
(I wonder how much the original airfare back to the USA was—In many cases, they must be losing money like crazy if they are giving everyone that kind of reimbursement offer)
The nearby hotel was more than that - the hotels were not exactly getting discounts. And that’s the maximum - BA did not hand out any money, you have to fill out the forms, send in the receipts, and get reimbursed. Maybe. So the hypothetical person in the OP would be out of luck.
I suspect people didn’t go to London because they were so uncertain about when and if they could get a flight out. Most people didn’t have the luggage either.
If you could get a hotel, it wasn’t that bad. Any hotel near Heathrow is now full, of course. Money for a hotel, assuming you can find one, hardly makes up for being abandoned by BA and, for many people, missing Christmas with their families. I suspect many of these people don’t have a flight even yet. Given that, and the possible need to be back at the airport as soon as possible to make some progress, I can see people not wanting to plant themselves relatively far away.
Anyhow, I’ll believe the money when we see it. It is quite possible that BA will say the vouchers aren’t valid because the delay was caused by a snowstorm. But the pit thread was not about the snowstorm or money, but about BA walking out on its customers.
Up to 200 pounds a day, remember. But they are definitely losing money, given that there are lots of people not flying (and probably a bunch canceling) on the busiest travel days of the year. Let’s also say that their reputation is suffering. I wonder if they will sue BAA for it. BAA is probably more culpable.
In any case, I’ve been traveling for business for 30 years, and I know that not paying for a bad situation does not improve it any. When I’ve been stuck someplace overnight due to weather, I was not thinking “goody, a free hotel night” though work paid.
BTW, The Daily Mail said that they were running out of food inside the terminal. Now, if you leave the terminal for any reason, you are not getting back in. My daughter had to show a printed copy of her reservation on her flight five times as she went to the gate. I can certainly understand people with families not wanting to leave to traipse around an unfamiliar city looking for a room, given that they might think that being there would give them an edge on getting a flight out. The BA web site crashed repeatedly, and their phones were always busy.
For £200 a day, you can stay in a top-notch hotel in Scotland and easily cover the travel costs. £200 is equivalent to £1400 a week, or a salary of £72,800. In your money, that’s about $100,000, which I’m sure you’ll agree is enough to maintain a lifestyle far above most of us.
How is temporarily giving you an equivalent salary of $100,000 “abandoning” you? They’re taking EXTREMELY good care of your daughter. I don’t even get where you complaint is coming from now. What do you want them to do? Invent a weather control machine? Put your daughter on a plane and launch it in dangerous conditions?
They’re clearly not walking out on their customers.
I get that you find it frustrating and incredibly inconvenient, and you want to blame someone. But it sounds like they’re taking VERY good care of your daughter, paying her enough to live like a king (queen), and not putting her on a plane in conditions which could risk her life. I’m at a loss to understand what you expect of them?
To repeat, they are not paying anyone £200 a day, they said they would reimburse hotel, food and travel expenses up to that level. I doubt if that would include a trip to Scotland - not that you could get there anyhow.
Good care? They did not find a hotel. They did not do anything except hand out a piece of paper. (Which they might or might not choose to honor.)
And my pitting, if you’d care to read it, was not about canceling the flight. When I started it I wasn’t aware of how badly BAA had screwed up. My pitting was about BA agents walking off their posts at midnight, and telling a long line of people that they’d be back, three strong as it turned out, at 5:30 am. I then added bringing in the police just before announcing that they would do no more in-person booking, but that people should use a website that spend the weekend crashing and a phone system that was nearly impossible to get through on.
Is that taking good care of anyone?
They quite literally did. Are you disputing this?
I have been delayed for a day or more due to weather conditions more than once. In all cases, customer service agents at the airport got me (and everyone else) alternate travel arrangements. Yes, lines were long, but for the most part no one minded because they were doing the best they could. And they were frustrated also.
In no case I’ve ever experienced or even heard of did the agents walk off their jobs with many customers waiting. I don’t know for sure but I’d suspect that management worked hard to bring in staff who was off, because every position was staffed. And certainly in no case did they shut down the airport facility and throw people onto the telephone system. (Much of this was pre-web.) Have you ever heard of such behavior? Do you think it is acceptable? What do you propose older people who don’t carry laptops and Kindles around with them should do?
This is also not personal. She did fine, because my wife, who works at home, could get her a room immediately (BA offered no help, of course) and because she could spend hours trying to get through, and finally did. This was before we were aware of any possible compensation. There was luck involved also. She was on one of the first flights canceled, and her plane yesterday was one of the few that got out.
I’m curious though - why do you think thousands of people are camped out in Terminal 5 if BA is doing such a smashing job?
Alternative travel arrangements? That is feasible if there are planes flying. The point is most of the planes aren’t flying; not just BA’s, but every airline. The only alternative travel arrangement they could have made was to stick her on a boat!
Honestly, I think you’re expecting the impossible.
When I did that search, they had rooms. But there are thousands of hotels in London and the surrounding area. A friend of mine was staying in a hotel near Heathrow last night. He had no problem booking a room. That £200 per day will more than cover any taxi or train fares.
I suppose things are clearing out - but the many people camping out in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and their long waiting list for rooms, seems to indicated that the rooms weren’t always plentiful. The Holiday Inn staff were quite nice, and I can’t believe that they wouldn’t have told the people in front of them about this plentiful hotel space.
Either travelers are really, really stupid, or there wasn’t as much hotel space Monday as you think. I can’t say anything about Wednesday or later.
Oh, and for alternate travel arrangements I was referring to the Tuesday flight that we managed to grab ourselves. Anyone who has been in this situation knows there is a big difference between having a confirmed reservation for whenever and having nothing at all. Going into London is feasible if you know you are leaving on Wednesday - otherwise I suspect that people wanted to be close to the action for when things started clearing out.
But it’s… London! One of the three World Capitals. It’s immense; it has enough hotels to give each waiting person an entire hotel each. It’s impossible not to be able to find a hotel room in London.
I imagine what happened is that people didn’t bother - they just preferred to wait and hope the weather cleared up.
Currently stuck here at Soekarno Airport, Indonesia. Got my debit card stolen, with exact money to pay for travel taxes and missed a flight. This couldn’t get any worse. The travel agencies do not even accept credit card payment. Was already imagining staying here in the airport for infinite no. of weeks. Complete nightmare! Good thing I was able to call with a travel agency back in Manila and they did all the rebooking for me. But it’s another $130. Considering all the ease and convenience of current technology, I think airports should have multiple forms of doing transactions with passengers other than cash-basis transaction — an utter disappointment with any government facility catering to foreign visitors. Sincere helpdesk for force majeur cases would be also best for passengers who are encountering difficulties which are beyond their capacities to deal with.
That isn’t a problem, surely? All airports have ATMs that will dispense cash from a credit account. So if you have a credit card you have cash to hand, so there’s no actual *need *for them to accept credit cards.
It’s an odd policy not to accept credit cards in a location where everybody will, by definition, be carrying a valid passport, but it doesn’t seem to have any practical effect.
This sounds like an easy answer, but I have no idea what the PIN is for any of my cards. To get the pin, the card company (issuing bank) would mail it via postal mail to my home, which would take a couple of days. In the case that I’m stuck on the far side of the world in an airport, having the pin in a printed form in my mailbox is of no help at all.
That said, I’m amazed that in an airport, everything you may want to buy can’t be purchased with a credit card.