Please sign in to post.

British Airways Itinerary Change - Resolved

I haven't been able to get a hold of an agent at BA so am going to ask here for some feedback. I'll continue trying BA but if the consensus here is not to bother, I'll come up with a plan B.

We have a roundtrip itinerary booked through BA from LHR to FCO and back. Our US to UK flights have changed enough on a separate booking that I'm not comfortable with keeping the LHR to FCO leg. I'm fine forfeiting the money on that portion but want to keep the FCO to LHR leg five days later. A change/cancellation of this nature cannot be done online. Should I ever get through to a BA rep, will this be something they are willing to do? Has anyone done this type of split with them before? Anyone have success reaching BA lately - tips for getting through would also be appreciated.

Posted by
11037 posts

Do I understand correctly what the situation is?
You have a US to LHR ticket. You have a separate LHR-FCO roundtrip ticket. You now arrive at LHR later than originally planned and have insufficient time to get to your LHR-FCO flight.

If you miss the LHR-FCO flight your return flight will be cancelled as a no show.

I doubt BA will let you change the LHR-FCO flight without incurring a change fee and probably a fare change(increase)

If you do not make a change and miss the 1st flight ( LHR-FCO) you will not have a FCO-LHR flight.

You do need to persist in your efforts to reach a BA rep.

Posted by
6734 posts

joe is correct. The critical bit: You can't "split" a ticket. Not with BA or with any airline.

If you have a round-trip ticket booked from A to B then returning B to A, if you fail to show for the outbound A to B, the rest of your itinerary will be cancelled, and that's the end of it. No airline is going to let you "split" the ticket. You could cancel and then rebook as a one-way from B to A, but the cost of doing that will be subject to all the airline's pricing policies. There is no "ticket splitting."

Posted by
3985 posts

Let me reiterate what was said above. If you skip, “split” or forfeit the LHR-FCO outbound ticket, your return ticket to LHR WILL BE CANCELLED.

Try reaching BA through Twitter.

Posted by
163 posts

After many attempts to contact BA, and just as many disconnected calls due to high volume, I finally reached a rep this evening. They confirmed our understanding that we could not cancel the one portion and that if we did miss the outbound flight, the return flight would also be lost. The rep did then explain that he could change the itinerary to drop the first flight and only have the second flight on the itinerary. In my head this felt like semantics over canceling one portion vs. changing the whole thing from roundtrip to one way and made me chuckle. It took some time, and some surprisingly reasonable fees, but we now have our return flights from FCO still in tact and new flights to FCO booked to meet our needs less stressfully.

Thank you to those who chimed in. As always, I appreciate this forum.