Will British Airways refund us after baggage error?

Q My wife and I flew to Switzerland before Christmas with British Airways to visit my daughter and our family. We had flown this route with BA before from Gatwick but in recent years they had withdrawn their service to Zurich. Since then, we have been using easyJet on this route. We thought on this occasion it would be a better experience to try BA again flying from Heathrow.

Although the flights were more expensive we were happy because, as before, we assumed the cost of the flights included one item of hold baggage each. Indeed, the emailed confirmation clearly showed that we were entitled to check in one 23kg bag each. We packed accordingly and were totally shocked when arriving to check our bags in to find that hold baggage had not been included in the ticket price and that we would have to pay an eye-watering £65 each for our bags, and similarly to bring them back on the return flight. This almost doubled the cost of our two return flights to well over £600.

I have written to BA customer relations about this misleading situation but have so far received no reply from them.

Graham S

A In my experience, problems like this most often arise when online travel agents are involved. But you had booked direct with British Airways, and your confirmation clearly shows that you had paid for checked baggage. So I contacted BA on your behalf, and a spokesperson speedily told me: “We have apologised to our customer for this error and have issued a refund.”

It appears that there was an issue with correcting the spelling on one of the names (this is something that British Airways does for free over the phone, so long as a travel agent is not involved). For some reason when the change was made, your luggage entitlement was deleted.

It’s regrettable that this could not have been sorted out at Heathrow before your outbound departure, especially as you had evidence that you had paid £14 per person each way for baggage.

In future you might want to save the baggage fee and avail of BA’s extremely generous cabin-baggage allowance, which permits a good-size case (56x45x25) and a smaller second item (40x30x15cm), each with a weight limit of 23kg.

You might not feel like lugging this through security to the gate (and of course you would need to follow the rules on liquids and sharps in cabin baggage), but in my experience BA often offers the chance to check it in for free in order to reduce the amount of cabin baggage that people are trying to cram into bins.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder