How British Airways, Qatar Airways and the Civil Aviation Authority built a perfect little trap — and each, quite correctly, denied responsibility for it.
There is a particular kind of modern absurdity that only reveals itself when you try to give a company money and discover you can’t. This is a story about that — about a checked bag I tried to buy ten months early, the airline website that cheerfully invited me to buy it, the two airlines that then spent a fortnight explaining why I couldn’t, and the regulator that wrote back to say the whole thing was none of its business.
It is, I think, a small but perfect example of how a system can be working exactly as designed and still be ridiculous.
The setup
I booked a long-haul return trip using Avios — a reward booking on flights operated end to end by Qatar Airways , but ticketed and sold by British Airways . This is an entirely normal thing to do. Millions of people redeem miles on partner flights every year. Because of how these redemptions work, the booking can only be made by telephone; the website won’t do it.
Fine. I made the call, the Avios came off, the tickets were issued, and a confirmation arrived listing a generous baggage allowance and noting — reasonably enough — that I “may also be charged for extra or overweight checked bags.” Extra bags, then, were a thing one could arrange. Good to know, because I wanted one.
The button that does nothing
So I went to manage the booking on the British Airways website, where the airline presents a tidy grid of things you can do: choose a seat, request a special meal, upgrade your cabin, and — right there, with its own little suitcase icon — Add extra baggage .
British Airways “Manage My Booking.” “Add extra baggage” is offered as a service, alongside seat selection, meals and cabin upgrades.
I clicked it.
It did not let me add extra baggage. It took me to a general information page explaining that baggage on partner-operated flights is governed by the operating airline, with a link sending me off to Qatar Airways’ site. No purchase. No price. No bag. Just a door marked “Add extra baggage” with a brick wall behind it.
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Where the button leads: an information page about partner-airline allowances. No purchase, no price — just a redirect to the operating carrier.
This, it turns out, is the whole story in miniature.
The bounce
Following the trail, I asked British Airways directly. Its escalations team — and I want to be fair here, because they were genuinely helpful and human throughout — told me in writing that extra baggage “can be booked directly through” Qatar Airways’ website.
So we rang Qatar Airways. They said no: extra baggage can’t be added to a ticket issued by another airline, and the only option is to pay at the airport on the day. We rang again. Same answer. And again. Three times. Eventually they put it in writing: prepaid baggage is available only on Qatar Airways’ own ticket stock, this restriction “applies strictly in all circumstances,” and no exception would be made.
One airline tells you, in writing, to go and buy the bag from the other. The other tells you, in writing, that it will never sell it to you. Both are correct about their own rules.
The passenger is simply standing in the gap between two policies that don’t meet.
The price you’re not allowed to know
Here is the part that tips it from frustrating into faintly insulting. Because I couldn’t prepay, the only route left was the airport excess-baggage desk — which, on this route, runs to around fifty US dollars per kilo . A single extra suitcase would cost north of a thousand dollars. Buying the same allowance in advance online — the option I was structurally barred from — would have been up to 20% cheaper.
And when we asked Qatar Airways simply to tell us what the airport charge would be, so we could at least budget, the answer was that it would be “the rules and rates applicable at that time.” You cannot buy the thing in advance. You cannot find out what it will cost. You can only turn up on the day and discover the number at the precise moment you have no alternative.
(The rational move, for the record, is to ignore the airline entirely and post the suitcase home, which costs roughly a tenth as much. When shipping a bag across the planet by courier is an order of magnitude cheaper than checking it in, something in the pricing has come loose.)
Credit where it’s due
I said I’d be fair, and I mean it, because the contrast is the point. British Airways actually engaged. A named human looked at the case, phoned me, took it to Qatar Airways himself, and was honest about the limits of what he could do. He couldn’t fix it — but he tried, and he didn’t hide.
Qatar Airways did the opposite. It recited a policy, linked to a webpage, and declined four times to engage with the substance, including a flat refusal to quote a price. One airline ran out of road. The other built the roadblock and put up a sign saying the road was someone else’s responsibility.
The bit nobody discloses
Strip away the back-and-forth and the real fault is singular: none of this is told to you when you book. Not on the phone, not in the confirmation, not anywhere a normal person would look before paying. You find out only afterwards, when you try to buy a bag and hit the wall. A reward booking that millions of people make comes with a quiet, undisclosed catch — that one of the most ordinary purchases in air travel is closed to you, and that the fallback is the most expensive version of it, at a price you’re not permitted to see in advance.
That’s not a service hiccup. That’s a transparency failure, and a structural one, because Qatar Airways confirmed in writing that it applies to every ticket not issued on its own stock. Which is to say: to everyone in my position, every time.
And the regulator?
You might think this is what a regulator is for. I did too. So I referred it to the Civil Aviation Authority — carefully framed not as “fix my booking” but as “here is a market-wide practice worth looking at.”
The CAA wrote back to say it no longer handles complaints about airlines that belong to a dispute-resolution scheme, and — my favourite sentence of the entire saga — that it “has no legal powers to impose a solution on an airline.” It directed me to that scheme, the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR), instead.
But CEDR only does one thing: it makes binding decisions on individual claims. It cannot touch the underlying practice. It can, at best, order one airline to refund one passenger one fee. It cannot ask why the door marked “Add extra baggage” leads to a wall, or why a price can’t be quoted in advance, or why none of this is disclosed at the point of sale.
So the systemic problem has no home. The regulator says it’s the scheme’s job; the scheme only does individuals; and the practice itself sails on, undisclosed, for the next person who clicks the button. I’ve now reported it to the Competition and Markets Authority , which — under the new consumer-protection regime — is the one body that can actually look at a practice rather than a single complaint. We’ll see.
The point
I will probably end up posting the suitcase. The fee, in the end, is survivable. What isn’t quite so easy to shrug off is the shape of the thing: a button that promises a purchase it can’t deliver, two airlines each pointing at the other, a price you can’t discover until it’s too late to avoid, and a regulator that has quietly arranged to have no responsibility for any of it.
Everything here is working as designed. That’s exactly what’s wrong with it.
