This post is a warning and a request for advice. We recently flew long haul with British Airways with our 1 year old. We booked premium economy for the first time (we can't usually afford it), thinking it would be a better experience. Boy was it a waste of money.
We received an email from British Airways confirming that we had the bassinet seat reserved. In their policies they specifically state that they may move your reserved seat, however "You can claim a refund for reserved seats if: You have paid for an upgrade and do not wish to pay the difference in order to reselect your seat in the alternative cabin."
www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/seating/seating-changes-and-refunds.
So their advertising makes it clear that if you buy premium economy with a bassinet and they don't give you the seat you have reserved, you are entitled to a refund of the difference if you then move to economy. You are never guaranteed a bassinet seat, but if you choose to go down a class when your reserved seat is taken away then their policy clearly states you get the refund of the difference (they don't dispute this if you ask them on the phone about it).
So we flew and they gave our reserved seat to someone else and offered us a different seat in Premium Economy. Rather than a 24 hour flight with our child on our laps, we moved to economy and the staff on the flight said we would be entitled to a refund. However, that's when their promises fell apart.
We called Customer Service and after a frustrating experience generally, we were told that the email confirming our seat reservation was an "IT error" and that we never had reserved seating. I asked why we weren't able to rely on their email as confirmation, and they were sheepish about that, but said they simply refused to honour their policy.
So the warning part of this post is that British Airways treated our young family in a highly dishonest manner.
So beware of buying premium economy (or business for that matter) with British Airways, as you may not get a bassinet seat for your kid and then paying the extra has been a waste of your money. Don't expect them to be honest about it afterwards.
More broadly, we were shocked that British Airways took such an unprincipled position, and it makes us question whether you can rely on their Customer Service team to help with other reasonable problems if something should go wrong. Not sure which airlines are better, but certainly this one is poor.
I should mention that I was a gold member of BA and extremely loyal to the airline for 6 years. I even sent them information on how much I had spent on them over the years (through work). That didn't matter to them in the end - so don't expect Executive Club to make any difference.
The advice part of this post is asking you whether you can think of anything that we can do to get British Airways to comply with their own policies.
What we've already done is contacted Customer Service, sent letters to the CEO and to the Civil Aviation Authority. We even contacted the tax office (since BA also did not give us a tax invoice for our flight - which is illegal).
We're not going to court - even though the difference is over £1000. It's clearly going to cost more than that to take legal action. The Customer Service representative at one stage boasted that ticket holders have few legal rights (so you need to rely on the good character of the airline, which they failed to display in our case).
Would anyone have any advice on anything else that we can do to make them do the right thing here?