BA holiday chaos

British Airways today braced itself for more flight cancellations and passenger fury as travellers converged on Heathrow for the start of the Bank Holiday.

Thousands of passengers have already been told their flights have been axed. The company today cancelled six more domestic flights and others could follow.

BA last night said it had cancelled four long-haul flights - and their return trips - to the US over the holiday, affecting 2,400 passengers.

It comes as forecasters predicted a warm and dry weekend for most of the country, prompting fears of serious jams for drivers. Traffic levels are expected to be 30 per cent higher than normal, with 15million cars on the roads.

At BA, teams of planners were today juggling staff numbers and flights to avert more disruption over its busiest weekend of the year. The airline will be carrying more than 100,000 passengers a day, on 540 flights, into and out of Heathrow. A BA spokeswoman said: "We are reviewing our operation on an hour by hour basis over the coming days."

Ten BA directors, including chief executive Rod Eddington, will be on duty in the airport lounges to "help out" already stretched staff on the check-in desks. And 200 volunteer staff will also be working to fill in for staff shortages on the check-in and ticket desks.

The move follows a horrendous week for BA and its passengers with scores of flights cancelled because the company has not got enough "front line" staff to cope with demand. Thousands of passengers were turned away with some spending the night in hotels.

BA is desperate to avoid a repeat of the fiasco and the bad publicity from pictures of travellers sleeping on the floors of packed lounges. The company could lose millions of pounds in future ticket revenue as travellers switch to other airlines.

When the bank holiday is over there will be a high-ranking review of exactly what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again.

Union leaders have criticised BA for axing too many staff in a bid to save cash. Mr Eddington, however, said the real issue was whether the company was doing enough to keep costs down. "It is a very difficult balance to get right - we have to get it right," he said.

BA admits it left it "too late" to recruit frontline staff after higher numbers than usual left earlier this year. The problems for air travellers come as the AA warned of heavy traffic on routes to the coast this weekend.

With huge sections of the mainline rail network to be closed, serious problems are also expected on the railways. This has been compounded by a 24-hour RMT strike over pay on the Eurostar services on Saturday. But Eurostar managers claimed the strike would have "no impact" on customers due to travel via the Channel Tunnel.