Passmethesickbag

We made an OnBusiness booking a few weeks ago when BA.com was acting up as usual. The agent kindly made the reservation over the phone, waiving the service charge.

We now need to, if possible, change the return portion to one day earlier. Both outbound and return are over a month in the future. Logging into OnBusiness and going to Manage my reservations, it says that this booking cannot be changed online, and you need to call reservations.

We called reservations, and eventually got through to an Indian call centre agent, who read her script three times, put us on hold, and then told us we had to call OnBusiness.

She gave us the wrong number for this, but we checked the real one and got through to another repeat performance of the hold music. The agent asked curious questions which were obvious from the booking (e.g. has the trip started yet, which class of service etc), and then told us sorry, this can only be changed online, and if the website gives you an error message, you just have to try another time.

So after one hour wasted for me and my colleague and a huge blood pressure surge, we still don't even know if there's availability to change the date, even less how to do get it done. I'm personally convinced that the reason that OnBusiness refuses to rebook online is that the original booking was made by an agent. Does anybody have any suggestion of how to take this forward (other than to try calling back another time when we've calmed down and hope we're not getting through to another brick wall of an agent)?

DrBernardo

The responses you received sound wrong to me. You certainly need to call the dedicated OB line rather than the normal telesales one, but they should be able to do anything with an OB booking.

If I were you you I'd try to call back again (during UK office hours) to see if they'll do it.

Failing that, if you have enough OB points, you could just rebook it , and then cancel the original booking. Presumably the cancellation process is more straightforward than a change, for them to be able to handle offline.

If none of those works, you could email one of the OB sales execs to see if they can get someone to do it, if you know who your company's dedicated contact is. (PM sent in case you don't have one).

Anonba

If its a Uk onbiz account would need to be handled by calling newcastle contact centre.

BobbySteel

how is one meant to contact OnBusiness if they've got hearing problems and can't use a phone? I struggle to understand how this country relies on phone support for almost everything...

Anonba

Ob sales execs?? I handle onbusiness calls and as far as im aware no such things exists unfortunately nor do companies have a dedicated contact.

Anonba

This is the number for onbusiness: 0344 493 0748

Mixbury

Be careful doing this with regard to points expiry; if you booked with points expiring December 2017 and cancel, you have to wait for those points to be credited back before being able to reuse them. If you have insufficient additional December 2017 points available, then a rebooking before the credit occurs will use points expiring in future years.

Not the most elegant explanation, but hopefully the gist is clear.

ChampagneSocialist

Sorry to hear OP's situation. Definitely you need to call OnBusiness during their opening hours (whatever those are as stated on the BA website).

IME OnBusiness were helpful when I had to change a booking date before departure (though also like OP after initially wasting time with standard BA CS hotline). My booking was a sightly complicated one in that it was a cash WTP booking upgraded to CW using OB points. The OB agent knew what she was doing and changed my flight without any problems.

In fact got more than I bargained for as the flight rebooked into R class, a paid business fare basis, so I got more Avios and TP than I would have done otherwise

Passmethesickbag

Thanks all. We called them back again, got through to another rep who seemed to shared the incredulity of the previous one about the possibility that BA.com might possibly not be doing exactly what it's meant to be doing. But after a brief summary of how much of our time had already been wasted, he made the change without a fee — so a happy end!

DrBernardo

It surprised me as well, but for the past 9 months or so I kept getting sporadic calls at inconvenient times (when I was either overseas or about to taxi at LHR). When they finally managed to call me at a time that I was at my desk in the UK, it turns out there is now such a team (somewhat akin to account managers, I guess) based in Ireland. In my case, they listened to my grumbles, said I wasn't the first person they'd heard the same grumbles from, and told me to call them any time I needed anything...