Transit Visa **** and Rude Ground Staff

We booked return flights on British Airways from Johannesburg to Prague via London Heathrow, our journey was scheduled to depart on 23 December 2019 from OR Tambo.

Our flights were booked months in advance via the BA website, and being a very diligent and regular traveller I read through my entire ticket including the fine print. Nowhere did it clearly state that a transit visa is required for a short layover in Heathrow, a layover where we wouldn't even leave the airport. When we arrived at the airport on the day of our departure we were turned away and refused boarding by the rude security. I then asked to talk to the airline self where their staff wasn't helpful either.

We had to cancel our entire vacation. After a very long telephone call I was finally offered a refund from BA, but I only received 16.4% of the total that I initially spent. British Airways literally ****** us of thousands of Rands. To add insult to injury we had to wait two weeks for the refund to actually reflect in my bank account.

We have travelled with various other airlines, to various locations and always with at least one layover per journey, and NEVER has this happened before. This leads me to believe that this is a British Airways problem. I find it astonishing that they fail to disclose that SA citizens needs transit visas even though they literally had months to disclose this information to us, and then suddenly when you arrive at the airport they know that you need one. This is blind ******* by a so-called "reputable" airline. Surely BA had a duty to inform us about the transit visas...

Furthermore, their ground staff and the security's attitude only adds to the very long list of grievances. We were "helped" by a person called Kurtin (part of BA ground staff), whose attitude would have been best left at home, even going so far as insulting me directly in my face, saying that this was all due to "bad planning" on our side. As regular travellers, I don't think that this was the case at all. The only "bad planning" I made myself guilty of, was booking with BA instead of Emirates/Qatar.