British Airways asked travellers to consider postponing their summer holidays yesterday as the airline struggle to deal with demand.
The UK's flag carrier contacted passengers set to fly before July 25 asking them if they'd reschedule their flights free of charge.
Travel expert Paul Charles, who runs consultancy the PC Agency, shared an email from BA to customers.
It asked passengers travelling in the next fortnight if they would like to reschedule their flights for free, and that they could change their trip to another BA-operated flight within the next 12 months, subject to availability.
A spokesperson for the airline said it hoped the policy would reassure customers and provide them with extra flexibility.
Mr Charles said: “I said it would be a summer of stress. BA now asking those travelling before July 25 to consider changing flights, so enabling them to more easily choose which flights to cancel at short notice.”
The airline, which laid off around 10,000 staff due to the pandemic, has been ravaged by cancellations and delays this summer as it struggles to get flights in the air and services running on time amid serious staff shortages.
In total 13% of BA flights will have been cancelled this summer.
In recent weeks it has grounded more flights from airports including Heathrow, which has stripped back the number of its departures due to staffing issues.
Earlier this week Heathrow Airport asked airlines to “stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers” amid winding queues at airports, lost baggage and axed flights."
A spokesperson for BA said of the request: "This is incredibly disappointing news for our customers, coming at a time when we’ve already taken responsible action to reduce our summer schedule to slim our programme further, utilising slot alleviation to minimise disruption, provide certainty for travellers and help airports manage their resource.
"As a result of Heathrow's request, we will now need to take a small number of additional flights out of our schedule and we will be contacting customers to apologise, advise them of their customer rights and offer options including rebooking or refund.
"We also know that some customers may want to review their travel plans in light of the current travel challenges and have introduced a policy that will allow customers to easily change travel dates so that they have additional flexibility."
The request also did not go down well with Emirates Airline, which accused the travel hub's chiefs of showing “blatant disregard” for holidaymakers, saying they ordered airlines to stop selling tens of thousands of tickets over the summer holidays.
The Dubai-based carrier said they would ignore an order to cancel flights to comply with a cap on passenger numbers.
Bosses said they were even threatened with legal action if they did not accept the demands.
Heathrow said “the network continues to suffer from Covid-related challenges.”
A spokeswoman added: “We had no choice but to take the difficult decision to impose a capacity cap designed to give passengers a better, more reliable journey and to keep everyone working at the airport safe.”
