British Airways: Passengers Face Delays After Check-In Glitch

British Airways passengers were hit by hours-long delays after an IT glitch affected worldwide check-in systems at airports - including Heathrow and Gatwick.

Angry travellers complained of long queues, with the systems problem reported at international airports in London, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Denver, Atlanta (BSE: 532759.BO - news) , San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Berlin, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Vienna, Rome and Durban.

Some passengers reported delays of up to five hours, with one in Denver complaining he had "been sat on the plane cooking" for "over 2 hours" and had been forced "to take my trousers off in an effort to cool down".

A BA spokeswoman later said the airline was "checking in normally across all of our airports," but added the process at Heathrow and Gatwick would be "a bit slower than usual" and customers were encouraged to check-in online.

Responding to passengers on Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) when the system first failed, the airline wrote: "We apologise to our customers for the delay and we appreciate their patience as our IT teams work to resolve this issue."

It added: "Our colleagues are doing everything possible to check in customers for their journey."

One passenger at Toronto Airport said: "I guess the check-in application is down and it's worldwide."

Passengers at San Francisco were handed a letter from British Airways explaining the delays.

It read: "At this time we are experiencing problems with the computer systems. As a result, in order to continue to check-in, in the absence of the computer system, we will be using a manual fallback process.

"Initially, this means the customer service staff need approximately thirty minutes to set the process up in order for it to work effectively and not to delay you later.

"Once we begin, check-in will be slower than normal, as information has to be recorded by hand."

Staff with clipboards were writing manual boarding passes for passengers, a delayed traveller at Seattle Airport said.

Matthew Walker had been waiting for more than two hours to board his flight back to Heathrow.

The 29-year-old financial analyst told the Press Association: "People were lining up, some had already checked in and got through security, but others, when this thing happened, whatever it is, were stuck in the check-in queue.

"So they (the staff) have the problem that they didn't know who had already gone through the gate because all the systems literally just had a meltdown, basically."

The airline is not the only one to have suffered an IT problem in recent weeks.

Last month, Delta Airlines ordered a ground stop after a power outage caused its IT systems to crash, leaving passengers stranded at airports around the world as scheduled flights were not taking off.