Travel questions

Will airlines allow flyers on board if they’re not on the passenger list?

Simon Calder answers your questions on third-party flight tickets, French airport strikes and visiting Disneyland

Friday 31 March 2023 13:09 EDT

Qantas ‘code shares’ with South American airlines, given it is a lightly served route (Getty)

Q I am a Brit travelling the world. Last October I asked Booking.com to book me a flight from Santiago in Chile to Sydney, Australia, for this coming Friday 7 April 2023. The flight was booked with the Chilean airline Latam but will be a code share flight operated by Qantas. I wanted to go online to “manage my booking” but Latam tells me that I have to contact Qantas. I did just that, but Qantas told me I am not on the passenger list. They and Latam told me to contact Booking.com. Which I did and was told I am booked on the flight. I was not convinced and talked again recently to Latam – who sent me an e-ticket. But Qantas says I am not on the passenger list. Do you think I will be able to fly?

Name withheld

A Routes from South America to Australasia are lightly served (and expensive). It is no surprise that Qantas “code shares” with Latam – the latter can take an allocation of seats, and market them as its own. Sometimes they may be cheaper than those offered by the Australian airline, and therefore a shrewd traveller will choose to book Latam flight LA807 rather than Qantas flight QF27 – even though they are one and the same plane.

So things are already complicated, and your decision about who to book through turns this into an outstanding exercise in travel complexity (and, I am sorry to say, a masterclass in what to avoid). You have bought a ticket marketed in Chile for an Australian airline through an online travel agent ultimately based in the Netherlands. While I am no expert in the precise airline reservation practices used in the southern hemisphere, it looks feasible that Latam would take a regular allocation of seats, market them, and only near to departure tell Qantas who is actually booked on the flight.

In the next couple of days you could go to the Latam downtown office in Santiago and politely ask airline staff to check whether you are on the list. If you are not, then you will have a few days to book an alternative, for which I suggest you consult a good travel agent in Santiago or book direct with the airline. After that, you can attempt to retrieve your initial investment – though I am afraid it is not at all clear which nation's consumer rights apply. Good luck.

Airport workers on strike at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport (Reuters)

Q Do you think the French air-traffic control strikes will be resolved soonish? Bit concerned that (like the strikes here in the UK) they will continue to rumble on into the peak summer season.

“Geema 10”

A One airline insider told me yesterday that there had been more flight cancellations in the first three months of this year due to industrial action across Europe than there had been for the whole of 2022. A cynical person might suggest that last year the carriers were cancelling flights in vast quantities because of lack of resources, and that the number hit by strikes was negligible by comparison.

But the waves of walkouts among French air-traffic controllers are causing havoc for airline schedules. Yesterday alone, British Airways grounded 50 short-haul flights. On Tuesday Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, warned that disruption would continue through April. Normally strikes that affect large numbers of travellers are short-lived; even the long and bitter rail dispute that has caused so much havoc in the UK for the past nine months has seen individual days targeted rather than weeks on end. Air-traffic controllers, though, are fully aware of the way their industrial muscle is magnified: more than half of easyJet’s flights touch French airspace.

Flights from Germany to Portugal, the UK to Spain and Ireland to Italy cross France (or, these days, take expensive, polluting and time-devouring diversions to avoid the troublesome skies). While none of the passengers on board is remotely involved in the debate about raising the French retirement age from 62 to 64, they are all affected by the fall-out. French trades unionists see the effects as causing significant harm to President Macron’s image – as well as the economies of France and other European nations.

Given that air-traffic controllers are relatively few in number and relatively well paid, they may well be seen as a good long-term bet for keeping the industrial pressure on and persuading the leader to back down. Passenger aviation is an extremely complex piece of choreography, dependent upon many different groups of workers to play their part. French air-traffic controllers are arguably the most indispensable of all – and, I predict, will continue to exercise that power.

The reader booked a holiday to Disneyland Paris – departing on 3 April (PA)

Q We booked a holiday late last year to Disneyland Paris, departing on 3 April. The travel agent asked if all our passports were up to date. We checked and said that they all were. Last Thursday the travel agent rang to get our passport details to book our seats on the flight. When I gave my son’s passport details she said it was out of date. The expiry date was fine but his date of issue was 19 March 2013. We were advised to go online and book an appointment with the passport office.

After various phone calls and most of the weekend spent trying to get a cancellation appointment, we went to the passport office in Liverpool to see if we could sit and wait to see someone. But the security guard said there was no chance. Has this “date of issue” been well publicised? Everyone we’ve spoken to hasn’t been aware – but they’re all checking their passports now.

Name supplied

A New post-Brexit passport rules have created vast amounts of stress and upset. I have done all I can to publicise the tough rules that the UK asked to be subject to after leaving the European Union. As you have found, a British passport must not be older than 10 years on the day of outbound travel to the EU, as well as having at least three months remaining on the day of return. I am concerned that the travel agent did not spell this out when asking you about the passports in the first place.

In normal times, learning that one passport was ineligible with 11 days to go before travel would not be a problem: your son could fairly easily find an appointment for a fast-track passport and obtain a new travel document in good time. Unfortunately, the forthcoming five-week strike by staff at HM Passport Office (from 3 April to 5 May) has spurred a flood of applications and blocked appointments for people, like your son, who urgently need a new passport.

I suggest a twin approach to try to rescue the trip: you can continue to try to secure a premium appointment; and also, given the emotional upset this is causing, contact your son’s MP and see if they can do anything to accelerate the process.

South Africa, home to the penguins of Boulders Beach, has now dropped all Covid rules (Getty/iStock)

Q We had a great South African holiday in February, flying on British Airways from Gatwick to Cape Town and back. But the flight home was diverted to Accra in Ghana because a passenger had been taken ill. Then there was a technical fault with the aircraft. We spent nine hours on the plane with a four-year-old, a three-year-old and a three-month-old. Finally the fault was fixed but by then the crew had run “out of hours”. We were taken to various hotels but spent two days without our luggage and finally arrived back 40 hours late. My travel insurer says it is “unable to process any claim as the aircraft left on time”. What’s the point in having insurance?

Niall McL

A British Airways flight 2040 from Cape Town to London Gatwick was halfway through its 6,000-mile journey from South Africa to Sussex when, over Benin, it turned and landed at Accra. I hope the person who suffered a medical emergency has recovered.

Whenever such diversions occur, there are substantial repercussions – in your case exacerbated by the technical fault. It must have been quite an ordeal with a very young family.

Travel insurance has a wide range of benefits. In my view the two most important elements for a trip like yours are cancellation cover and, if the trip goes ahead, providing medical care abroad. Most policies also have travel delay cover, typically paying out £50 for a delay of 12 hours plus an additional £50 for subsequent 12-hour spells. In your case that would, theoretically, be worth £150 per person. Your insurer has chosen to base the payment on the outbound delay, which I can understand is annoying. Yet there is another avenue you can pursue: flight delay compensation. No payouts are due when a flight diverts because of a medical emergency. But the onward journey from Accra to Gatwick was given a new flight number, BA204D, and the original cause of the detour was no longer relevant for the purposes of a claim. (You were presumably given new boarding passes for the onward trip.)

If a technical fault delays a long-haul flight by four hours or more, a UK airline is required to pay £520 per person in compensation.

I daresay British Airways will defend a claim on the basis that the cause was “extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided by all reasonable measures”. It may be that a court will need to decide, but with more than £2,000 in cash compensation at stake you might decide a legal case is worthwhile.