British Airways booking check and Heathrow transit for Indian passport holders

How to look up a booking on British Airways

1. 1Go to britishairways.com, choose the India site and select Manage My Booking, also shown as Find my booking.
2. 2Enter your booking reference and the other details the form requests, copied exactly from the confirmation.
3. 3Check names, flight numbers and dates, and whether any leg is an IndiGo codeshare into Delhi or Mumbai.
4. 4If you bought direct and paid, remember BA’s full refund for cancelling within 24 hours of booking, which has exceptions.
5. 5From 24 hours before departure, check in from the same page or in the BA app.
6. 6An unpaid reservation is outside BA’s 24-hour refund rule, since nothing has been paid to refund.

Why BA’s price hold does not help from India

BA sells Hold your flight price, which keeps a fare for up to 72 hours for a deposit of £5 per person on short-haul and £10 on long-haul, refunded within 21 days if you pay in full before the hold ends. It is limited to selected BA and Iberia flights booked on ba.com at least 21 days ahead, excludes Avios bookings and packages, and lets you change names but not dates, route or the mix of passengers.

The terms list India among the excluded departure origins, alongside Pakistan, Egypt and Nigeria. In practice the hold is not available on any itinerary that starts in India. A round trip beginning in London might qualify if booked 21 days or more ahead, which rarely fits an Indian visitor.

BA’s 24-hour free cancellation also leaves out bookings “where immediate payment isn’t required”, so it is no stand-in. For a visa file, the desk can hold a flight reservation on a BA routing in your name without payment. It is not a ticket, and BA, not the desk, decides how long the unpaid hold lasts, so order it for the day you submit.

Checking in with BA from India

BA opens online check-in 24 hours before departure on ba.com through Manage My Booking or in the app, which can download boarding passes for up to eight people on one booking. No Indian airport is on BA’s list of places without online check-in. At long-haul international airports check-in closes at least 60 minutes before departure, some close at 90, and Manage My Booking shows the exact deadline for your flight.

BA began rolling out a new app in July 2026 covering check-in, changes inside the app and boarding passes saved to Apple or Google Wallet. On the way home, note that for intercontinental flights from Heathrow Terminals 3 and 5, BA checks your passport and visa before security even if you already hold a boarding pass.

If the trip is a UK visit, GOV.UK’s supporting documents guide lists flight bookings as less useful evidence “unless transiting”. A reservation records your plan; your finances and reasons to return carry the application.

Heathrow transit for Indian passport holders

GOV.UK says an Indian national who arrives in the UK on a flight and leaves again without passing immigration normally needs a Direct Airside Transit visa. The exemptions decide most cases: a valid visa for Canada, New Zealand, Australia or the USA removes the need, as does an EEA or Swiss residence permit or category D visa. So Delhi–London–New York on a valid US visa needs no DATV.

A Schengen short-stay visa is not on that list, so a traveller whose only other visa is a Schengen C visa still needs a DATV at Heathrow. Indians cannot use the UK ETA because India is on the visa national list. A UK Standard Visitor visa does remove the need. The DATV fee is £41.50, which GOV.UK says “may change slightly depending on which country you’re in”.

If bags are not checked through, or the onward flight is on a separate ticket, you pass UK border control and need a Visitor in Transit visa (£74.50, for leaving within 48 hours) or must qualify for Transit Without Visa. Moving from Heathrow to Gatwick is a change of airport and always means border control.

BA’s India routes and the IndiGo codeshare

BA describes “56 flights a week from our gateways of Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai to London Heathrow”, and it has flown to India since 1924. In October 2025 it announced a third daily Heathrow–Delhi flight “in 2026, subject to regulatory and capacity approval”; whether that has started was not confirmed. The same announcement brought First back to London–Mumbai and promised Club Suite on select flights across all five routes by the end of 2026.

Since 12 October 2023 BA’s codeshare with IndiGo lets passengers connect via Delhi to Amritsar, and via Mumbai to Kochi, Ahmedabad, Goa, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, Rajkot and Vadodara. For a Punjab applicant, Amritsar–Delhi–London on a single BA booking keeps the trip as one journey.

Heathrow airside transit: who needs a DATV

British Airways questions, answered