News

THE trade has hit out at British Airways for throwing the start of the summer holiday season into disarray.

Angry agents and operators were stunned the flag carrier couldn’t prevent wildcat strikes that left thousands of passengers stranded at Heathrow on Friday July 18 - one of the most important dates in the calendar due to the start of the school holidays.

Staff walked out over the introduction of a new swipecard entry system to log start and finish times.

The trade is also fuming at the lack of communication from BA and is demanding to know how it will compensate them and their passengers.

In another setback, two bombs planted by Basque separatist group ETA rocked Benidorm and Alicante last week.

TUI UK managing director Chris Mottershead issued a plea for calm as the Foreign Office warned UK visitors to Spain to be vigilant.

ABTA president and Travelscene sales director John Harding said of the BA affair: “To allow this to happen, knowing it was going to affect the peak summer departures, was badly considered to say the least. Why couldn’t they have delayed the change until a rainy weekday in October?”

Agents were forced to spend the weekend handling irate calls from customers and rebooking or refunding clients. Many were forced to do this without a clear picture of what was happening because of a lack of information from the airline.

Travel Trust Association director Todd Carpenter said the first contact he had with BA was an e-mail received on Monday July 21.

ABTA aviation chief Sandy MacPherson said BA would have to compensate agents for the extra work.

“The question is, who is going to pay for the additional costs? Rebooking passengers, dealing with people who want to reroute and refunding others all costs the agent money,” he said.

BA is believed to be considering launching a temporary agent incentive scheme to try to prevent a slump in bookings. Rivals Virgin and EasyJet claim to have benefited from BA’s problems, while customers at MacPherson’s Voyager Travel agency have asked not to fly with BA.

“We said there could come a day when BA needs the trade and this appears to be it, but the airline may rue the way it has treated travel agents in recent years,” MacPherson said.

BA chief executive Rod Eddington issued a public apology to the thousands of passengers whose travel plans were disrupted.

More than 400 long and short-haul flights were cancelled and long delays continued until late last week.