The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
BA passengers delayed after Fly check-in flops
Hundreds of thousands of passengers around the world faced delays earlier this week when British Airways’ check-in system suffered a meltdown, leaving the airline contemplating the possibility of hefty compensation claims.
BA brought into a service a new computer programme, called Fly, late last year, but the airline has encountered a number of hiccups over the summer, with glitches causing queues and delays at its hub at Heathrow Terminal 5 as many as three times in recent months.
The crash this week appeared to be the largest yet, with compensation specialists Bott & Co estimating that the flights of 75,000 passengers were directly affected, while “hundreds of thousands” more might have experienced knock-on delays.
Heathrow and Gatwick were at the centre of the disruption, but travellers in the US, including Chicago, Boston and Seattle, were also hit. BA denied the problem was worldwide.
More worrying for BA – but perhaps a relief to passengers – is that those affected should be entitled to compensation, as governed by EU regulations.
Telegraph Travel’s consumer expert Nick Trend said: “If the computer glitch is deemed to be the responsibility of the airline, and it is hard to see how it won’t be, for delays of three hours or more you are entitled to a cash payment of €250 (£210) for short flights and €400 for a flight distance of 1,500km to 3,500km. For flights of over 3,500km, you should receive €300 for a delay of between three and four hours, and €600 for more than four hours.”
A BA spokesperson said the airline did not cancel any flights as a result of the problem.
“The check-in issue affected flights from the US overnight,” the spokesperson said. “We were checking customers in as normal by Tuesday morning.”
With regards to any resulting compensation, the spokesperson said: “We would look at any claims from customers on a case-by-case basis.”
BA’s new system was installed at airports across the world in October last year, while its full introduction was completed earlier this year.
The Fly system is designed to deal with all aspects of arriving for a flight, including the checking of visas and passport, as well as baggage handling. The breakdown of the system meant that some fliers were given handwritten boarding passes.
Srinath Mallya, head of travel and logistics at Syntel, a digital solutions company that works with airlines, said that computer set-ups in the aviation industry often are based on old “legacy” mainframes that “have been heavily customised and layered with add-ons as well as interfaced with many other modules and systems to support new services.
“As customers have come to expect functionality such as online booking, mobile apps, real-time schedule alerts and other digital capabilities, it has a created a patchwork of legacy systems and newer technologies.
“As any software engineer will tell you, this sort of complexity is the enemy of reliability,” he said.