High level BA complaints contact needed ASAP

[pidsy]

Having huge issues with BA at the moment - cant seem to get hold of anyone willing to help.

long story short:

Flying out in the next few days to St Lucia on BA - Mrs P is registered Disabled and for spinal reasons needs legroom. BA apparently have a specific department for helping - who have been worse than useless so we binned that idea instead, choosing to pay for additional legroom ourselves and sort it out ourselves. all fine (a few hundred £'s lighter) but hey ho.

got an email from BA today stating that their original seat plan released was in fact wrong and they have moved us from our legroom seats back into the middle of the plane.

calls to a manager at BA today resulted in "theres nothing we can do. speak to check-in when you get to gatwick"

im not at all happy - MRS P cannot hack an 8.5 hr flight in a standard seat.

i'd appreciate it if anyone has contact details or a phone number i can contact a bit higher up the chain. im not a user of FB or twitter so cant take that route.

hoping PH can come to the rescue on this one!

[pidsy]

cheers Guys,

i did think about going to gatwick but is a couple of hours each way. im still tempted to though.

i'll take a look at the forum.

[pidsy]

Fas1975 said:

Which legroom seat? Emergency exit? With a medical condition, she would be denied anyway as she would be unable to help in an emergency. If bulkhead, then you're genuinely better off in a standard seat as with a bulkhead, there's nowhere for your legs to go, with a regular seat, you can at least stretch them out. Worst case scenario, get a standard seat and then speak to the crew on board and they will usually let you use the cabin jump seats if you really need it, and there's a few to choose from.

Also, if you've already paid for seats and BA were not able to fulfil, then you can request a refund online: http://www.britishairways.com/travel/webforms/publ...

we usually end up with bulkhead seats and a couple of airlines have been fine with exit rows too - her condition means that she can walk (though not far) but she can get around. going through the refund process now - thank you for the link.

i'll keep the jump seat option open but its really upset her - she like to have everything planned beforehand and that's a bit last minute. it is a handy option i can suggest if we get nowhere else with proper seating.

[pidsy]

thanks for all the pointers everyone.
had some enlightening responses on flyer talk (cheers perik omo)

it would appear that BA make no provision for people with disabilities at economy level across their fleet at all.

so... had we known that at the point of booking - we'd have gone world traveller plus. it wasnt offered at the time and the booking agents were aware of the situation.

current offer from BA to upgrade now - £1k.

so pretty much stuffed.

[pidsy]

That's where (again) we've been given conflicting info.

We've paid for the centre seats in an exit row (which BA said yesterday would be fine) but having spoken to two BA employees would appear to still constitute an exit row so they are well within their rights to refuse us those seats. I've since checked with BA's own policy on seating restrictions and it says the same.

There's nothing else I can do other than hope that checkin staff are a bit more helpful.

What makes it worse is that if checkin decide we cannot have those seats, we will then be allocated according to what's left so we could end up not sitting together at all.