Sebouh Nahabedian

Sebouh Nahabedian, a financial analyst from New York, and Ara Asatoorian, a transportation consultant from Los Angeles, said that they were astounded when a BA manager told them they could only have seats in economy class, no matter what seats were free in business class.

There were supposed to fly to Armenia from Heathrow on Thursday but were told by BA that they could not leave until Sunday. But when they rang their travel agent in the US, they discovered that business class seats had been available on Saturday’s flight.

Mr Asatoorian said: “We rang BA and asked if we could be upgraded but the guy would not do it because we had economy tickets. We asked if showing up at the airport and waiting to see if the business seats were claimed would help but he told us that if that were the case then those seats would fly empty. The guy said nothing would help. That was just the cherry on top of the whole situation. This trip has cost us each $3,000 [£1,600] and we have missed three days of our conference. The business class thing was unbelievable. The guy just would not budge.”

Excerpt from Times Online