British Airways has apologised to customers who incorrectly received emails stating that upcoming flights had been cancelled due to strike action set to be taken by the British Airline Pilots Association.
On Friday BALPA announced plans for three days of strikes, taking place on September 9, 10 and 27.
BA then started contacting customers advising them of cancelled services, some of which were outside of the strike dates above.
But it appears an unknown quantity of these emails were sent in error – a member of the Business Traveller team was advised that their flight on September 12 had been cancelled, and subsequently spent several hours on the phone to BA, only to be told that the notification was incorrect.
A second email was then sent out to those customers, confirming that the flights in question would in fact be taking place, and apologising for “any inconvenience or concern” the confusion had caused.
According to the BBC, British Airways said it had received nearly 40,000 calls in the first 24 hours following cancellation notifications being sent out, and was working “around the clock to help fix people’s problems”.
The error follows disruption to hundreds of BA flights earlier this month, after a failure with online check-in and flight departure IT systems.
The chaos is being discussed by other frustrated customers on our forum, and comes at an unfortunate time for the carrier, which has been officially celebrating its 100th anniversary this weekend.
The carrier traces its history back to August 25, 1919, when Aircraft Transport and Travel Limited launched the world’s first daily international scheduled air service, between London and Paris.
