British Airways ‘abandoned’ a lone 14-year-old girl in Toulouse Airport after the plane left without her because the gate number that was marked on her boarding pass was changed after she had already checked in for her flight to London.
The teenager was traveling home after spending some time in France with her cousin and, according to the girl’s parents, she made her way to the gate marked on her boarding pass where she waited for her flight to board.
When airport staffers eventually arrived at the podium, she approached them only to discover that they had arrived for a different flight and that the British Airways flight to London had already departed from another gate just 50 meters away.
In a letter to The Guardian, the girl’s parents slammed the airline, saying: “BA knew she was 14. They knew she was physically in the airport. They knew she had been given wrong information about the gate that was 50 metres away and they were too lazy to check on a young girl sitting on her own.”
The letter continued: “She was shouted at by airport staff as she tried to get back through passport control and security and was in floods of tears. No one offered her any support.”
Thankfully, the girl’s cousin was able to pick her up from the airport but when her parents contacted British Airways to rearrange her flight, the airline demanded they buy a completely new ticket for £1,200.
After some complaints, British Airways eventually agreed to reduce the price of the new ticket to £680.
The minimum age that British Airways allows children to travel unaccompanied is 14 years old and the airline expects teenagers to be able to navigate the airport on their own and without any assistance.
Unlike some carriers, British Airways does not offer an ‘unaccompanied minor’ program, which involves an airline staff member chaperoning lone child travelers through the airport and onto the plane.
British Airways axed its Skyflyer service back in 2016, and although the exact reason was never revealed, it’s believed that it was part of a wider cost-cutting initiative that occurred around the same time.
The incident comes just weeks after Canadian carrier Porter Airlines accidentally removed a lone 14-year-old girl from a flight due to a weight and balance issue.
Camryn Larkan was due to fly as an unaccompanied child on a Porter Airlines flight to Victoria, British Colombia, on August 30 after visiting her family in Toronto, but she was booted off the plane after she had already boarded.
Porter Airlines admitted that it had to involuntarily boot some passengers from the flight due to a weight imbalance, but the airline said that because Camryn’s parents hadn’t paid for its unaccompanied minor service, it had no way of knowing that Camryn was under the age of 18.
If Porter Airlines had known that Camryn was a child, the carrier says it wouldn’t have removed her from the flight.
In that case, Camryn was effectively told to fend for herself, but luckily, her father was able to pick her up from the airport.
As for what happened in Toulouse, it’s surprising that given the fact that British airways knew that the girl had checked in for her flight and was in the departures area, staff didn’t make more of an effort to find her, given the fact that they would have known she was a young, lone, female traveler.
