BA's £80 for ruined holidays

BRITISH Airways has made a 'derisory' £80 compensation offer to thousands of travellers who had their holidays ruined by the Heathrow check-in strike.

The deal is a one-off payment that will come in the form of a voucher and will be made regardless of whether passengers were delayed for an hour or four days and whether or not they lost their luggage.

The dispute - over the imposition of electronic clocking-in swipecards - affected 80,000 people flying out of the airport on 18 and 19 July, but the knock-on effects lasted all week.

Passenger groups said it was ridiculous to pay the same sum to customers stranded for three hours as those stranded for days.

A spokesman for the Air Transport Users Council said: 'Having one figure like this is unfair. Some people were only delayed for a few hours but others were there for hours. If you were sitting at Heathrow for two days, £80 is not much. We would have hoped BA would offer vouchers which depended on how long the customer was stranded for.'

When the strike broke out at the height of the summer getaway, BA said it would award compensation to passengers on a 'case by case' basis.

At the end of the dispute it agreed to foot the bill for hotel accommodation for families who were forced to stay overnight at the airport as well as paying for food and transport costs incurred during the delays.

BA said the £80 voucher was a 'gesture of goodwill' and added that almost 17,000 passengers had been contacted offering the deal. 'We recognise how upsetting and frustrating the strike at Heathrow must have been to disrupted customers,' a spokesman said. 'We hope that these vouchers will go some way to making up for the problems that people encountered.'

Passengers are also being advised to claim compensation from their holiday insurance. For information on the latest situation at Heathrow, telephone 0800 727800 or 0870 8509850