Cancelled Flights seem to be a norm with Flight Centre

We had a horrid experience with Flight Centre. We are never the type of people who take to social media due to person experiences, but the complete lack of response and professionalism that comes with Flight Centre is utterly shockin!

My husband and I had planned to fly to Heathrow London and had bought tickets on the 15th of December 2019. We were supposed to board a direct flight from OR Thambo to Heathrow on 19 September 2019. The main reason for our trip was to attend a wedding.

As we arrived at the airport, the flight BA050 to Heathrow at 8h10am did not exist. We asked the British Airways consultant at OR Thambo and they said that the flight did not exist. Completely stressed and confused, we then phoned our Travel agent to find out what happend with our flight and what we must do. She said the flight had been cancelled but no one notified her about it. I then googled the flight no. to find on a forum that it had been cancelled IN APRIL 2019 (5 months ago). She then said that BA can put us on a flight 2/3 days later, which would mean that we would have missed the wedding regardless. She then suggested that we must book a different flight.

I then booked a new flight that Evening on Kenyan Airways with a 10 hour Layover in Nairobi, Kenya and then the next day flight to Heathrow. THIS WAS MADE WITH OUR OWN EXPENSE. Not only did we have to pay R15,167.86 EXTRA, we also lost activities in London that were already paid for on top of that from the day missed due to new transit times.

We were utterly in disgust with the professionalism from Flight Centre not only for NOT managing our flight schedule but NOT informing us ages ago about the flight changes so that we could make alternative arrangements. The additional fact that the travel angents contact details were put down on the booking information, not our own, means that she WOULD have been notified in APRIL about the cancellation of BA050 could have avoided all of this.

In retrospect the fact that this is the second time this has happend to me, while booking with Flight Centre is an absolute testament to their incompetence at managing and maintaining flight schedules.

We are frequent travellers and we have NEVER had these issues with other travel agencies. Complete daylight ******ly and a dreadful way to start your travels. But possibly the worst is the complete lack of response and accountability from Flight Centres side, despite this being 100% the ball dropped on their side.

My question... How did Google know this flight had been cancelled but our travel agent who graciously put her own details on OUR booking did not?