British Airways expects to run a full flight schedule at London's Heathrow on Tuesday after a worldwide computer system failure at the airline stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, the airport said on Monday.
The IT outage had a knock-on effect on BA services around the world, while passengers who did get moving on the limited number of flights to take off from the United Kingdom reported arriving at their destinations without their luggage.
BA chief executive Alex Cruz blamed the IT failure on a power surge and promised that the airline would compensate the customers whose travel plans were disrupted over the weekend. It was so strong it also rendered the back-up systems ineffective, he said.
"It was restored after a few hours in terms of some hardware changes", he said.
Shares in IAG, which is listed in both London and Madrid, fell 2.8 per cent in Spain on Monday and are expected to fall again in London trading when it reopens after the bank holiday.
"BA have made substantial profits for a number of years, and many viewed the company's actions as just plain greedy", said the GMB's Mick Rix. That does not include the cost of reimbursing customers for hotel stays.
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The British union GMB linked the IT problems directly to the company's decision to cut IT staff previous year.
Reports of the IT outage drew widespread criticism from British media and union representative, with one senior representative telling Britain's Guardian newspaper that it "could have all been avoided".
"They've all been local issues around a local data center, which has been managed and fixed by local resources", he told Sky News.
He added that while other airlines had also suffered large-scale system failures, the British airline had "failed so far to accept that they have, through their own policies of outsourcing, left the airline far more vulnerable to future IT problems".
BA itself canceled another 27 flights and had 56 more delayed.
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