dunk

We've had a number of threads recently about finding which BA offices are currently open. Given the news that we can now contact any office, and not just the one in our home country, more people may be asking this question.

In need of a little 'project' to play with some technologies and occupy a few hours, I've put together a little web app that may be useful to some. It attempts to answer the question "I'm currently in XYZ; which BA/BAEC offices are open now ?", and is targeted at:

1. people who are stuck in the back of beyond and need to urgently contact BA
2. night owls who discover redemption availability at 3am and want to book before it disappears

Given a location/timezone, it will list the global BA or BAEC offices that appear to be currently open. It can also identify the correct timezone based on your location and produce a list of all offices.

The URL is http://app1-baft.rhcloud.com/finder.php

A few caveats:

• I'm a techie playing with technology, not a designer, so the, ahem, 'user experience' is not perfect (any UI/UX people out there ?)
• the data is scraped verbatim from ba.com and I haven't validated it
• I've only tested on the couple of devices/browsers I have to hand
• it drives a coach and horses through the ba.com Ts&Cs about reusing their data, so BA would be well within their rights to tell me to take it down
• I may lose interest at any point

If you'd find this useful, please let me know. Feedback welcome of course.

PS and finally an FT/BA 'pub quiz' question: which two BA locations have 24/7 service ? (no cheating ! )

KARFA

Thanks, this is excellent dunk. I know you mentioned this tool on another thread and it is really useful. ^^^
.

jcm9000

Oh very nice indeed Dunk. Outstanding! Link....saved. PS i did look up my current location (cayman) and it is saying on the site it is currently closed - same for jamaica, bahamas and turks and caicos. Is that because we get put through to the US from what I can tell?

PS for the pub quiz, your app gave me the answer. Is that cheating??

Lobengula

I like ^

Now bookmarked so don't you dare cancel it

dunk

You win a Ferraro Rocher for finding the first bug

Certainly BA don't have 140+ global offices and there are some obvious 'hub' call centres (UK, NYC, HKG, SYD, etc), but sometimes it's useful to have alternate numbers for them.

Gshumway

Interesting to see that the phone number for places like Costa Rica is area code 408 (San Jose, California) and not in the area code 718 as for the US.

jcm9000

Yay! My boss gave me one the other day, so we'll call it quits.

corporate-wage-slave

Yes I thought it a bit odd that Cuba's office number looked quite familiar to me.

But my goodness, what a nice program, presumably it wasn't coded in COBOL.

PWOZUK

^ This deserves a "well-done"

mjh0

Smashing job. Really useful when you're on the road. ^

Given the growth in "open data", e.g. availability of data from places such as Network Rail/ATOC, TfL, etc., I wonder if old staid BA could blaze a bit of a trail by providing some of their (obviously not commercially sensitive or personal) information such as this as "open data" over an API - maybe have developers sign some sort of agreement to access the API - but by having this, lots of useful tools could be developed by the wider community, which in turn removes some of the burden from BA's own IT folks.

Just a thought...

dunk

I quite agree.

However, airlines are particularly wary of 'scraping' given the issues they've had in the past with price comparison sites, as it messes with their personalisation and variable pricing strategies. But for e.g. schedules, timetables, etc, then why not ?

I found some publicly accessible web services for e.g. airport code lookups, but performance and quality is variable.

The "Help ! I don't know which timezone I'm in !" functionality is based on the Google geocoding and timezone APIs. Very powerful and amazing what you can achieve in twenty lines or so of code.

Thank you for all the kind comments. Constructive criticism and feedback is welcome too.

paul78

Nice piece of work.

^
:-:

heartybob

That's really useful - thank you dunk.

[rant]I was in BGI last week on a 241 booked in W on the return when J opened up the day before departure but could I get through to UK BAEC to change the booking? Not a chance. I tried three times and each time was left hanging on, listening to the apparently reassuring message that an agent would be with me as soon as possible. In total the three wasted mobile calls cost just under £49.

Why can't BA at least do as many other call centres do and let you know how long you're likely to be left in limbo so you can decide whether to hang on or hang up?[/rant]

hillrider

BA needs to be introduced to the 1980s product called global call forwarding.

Local number, open 24 / 7, forwards to whatever call center is open at the time.

Maybe they can use one of these in reverse!

Tripper737

Thanks! The so-called info on BA's website as to local call centre hours I sometime hopelessly out of date. Nice to have a reliable source of info as to where one can call for service when!