British Airways flights from Manchester to Harare (MAN - HRE)

BA blamed the delay on fog in London, my sister (works for BA at LHR) said it was no different to a lot of day which didn’t cause delays. I tried to ask if we could reroute as we looked like missing our connection. Ground staff in BCN did not want to talk about that at all & they said there is absolutely no BA ticketing desk or such in that airport. So they said I was going to make my connection and told us to board, while I was getting text updates that the flight was delayed… The gate agent denied that the flight was delayed even though I showed her my text messages. I asked if they just wanted us out of the terminal and we would sit on the plane for an hour or so, to which she said no, the flight is going to go. They got us to load onto the bus and we’re trying to squeeze more people into this bus when they all of a sudden stopped made us stand on the bus for another 10 minutes to then eventually admit there’s a delay and told us all to get off the bus and back into the terminal. The same lady then announced at a delay and told us or to come back in one hour. We walked into the terminal and after only about 10 or 15 minutes I got a text. Say the flight is only delayed about seven minutes and we should return to the gate. Arriving back at the gate there was mass confusion and we bought the bus and went out to the plane. We ended up sitting on that plane for about an hour… Whether it was the delay or that the gate agent had told everyone to leave the gate area and come back in one hour. I believe there were quite a number of passengers that didn’t come back to the gate until she had said so here we were sitting on a plane now waiting for people and not a delay for weather. We arrived into.LHR to receive a text message that we have now missed our connection (just as I had predicted because it was very obviously going to happen) and that BA had put us on a flight the next day (22 hours later!) We were not going to get a hotel or any compensation because now you’re blaming this delay on ‘weather’… this is completely unacceptable as there were so many other flight options that we could’ve been put on and it just shows the laziness and the “don’t care” attitude of British Airways in a situation that they created. There were very few ticketing agents, and hundreds of people lining up to speak to them so getting to those people was basically impossible. I called a British Airways number and fortunately got somebody in a call center in India. This girl and I leveled on the situation and she was the only bright light in my day. She worked with me to find another flight through Seattle to SFO. Which we caught a couple of hours later and continued our journey. What really annoys me is that I am a very seasoned traveler and can see through this bad communication and poor decision-making by BA and know how the system works for me to navigate and find an avenue to rectify it. Unlike the hundreds of people who are traveling probably for their once a year holiday which no doubt made up most of that line of hundreds of people wanting to talk to the ticketing agent. That is a massively stressful situation that couples and families should not have to navigate if British Airways communicated better and actually put a human element into rebooking people than not giving a care and booking people 22 hours later where they would find themselves with children sleeping on the floor of an airport… This experience was greatly avoidable in many ways, I understand it’s not a perfect world, but it’s enough to show me that I should be looking for other airlines when flying to Europe in the future.

Cancelled flight extended my travel time by over 10 hours and no one was available to.assist with accommodation during a 15 hour layover.

The check-in and customer service were excellent as usual!