ceBA stands for ‘Customer Enabled British Airways’. This covers a multitude of sins such as the website, manage my booking (MMB), online check-in (OLCI) and the self service kiosks.
Ba.com
Ba.com is (unsurprisingly) BA’s website, allowing you to book tickets for any BA flight. There’s also an area for Executive Club Members.
BA.com has also recently been updated to properly support Macs. Previously, it was coded so badly that you couldn’t even bring up your Executive Club statement. They’ve ironed out most of the bugs now though. However, they are only supporting Safari under MacOS X. Any other browser is NOT supported. Under Windows, they are only supporting IE. Gecko based browsers such as Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox tend to work mostly (especially since it’s been re-written for Safari support), but some things may not work properly.
If you’re booking a flight that’s a single hop, you’ll be presented with the Fare Explorer to choose your times. It’s an easy colour-coded way of selecting the cheapest fare. It’s recently been enhanced to allow you to upgrade either one, or both legs of the flight (if applicable). If you’re logged in to the Executive Club area, it’ll tell you how many miles you’ll earn too. The fare explorer won’t come up, if you’re booking flights with a connection.
Paying for Flights
It’s a little more of a pain to book flights that don’t depart from your country of residence, but it is possible. On the current website, you can directly select a different starting destination from the front page. However, if that doesn’t work you can force the issue…
In the navy blue bar near the top of the site, the country you selected when you first visited the site will be displayed (for the majority of people it’ll be United Kingdom or USA). Clicking on it brings up a country list, where you can change your starting point. Proceed through the booking process as normal. When you get to the payment page, the country in the field is irrelevant despite what the website says. As long as the credit card number, name on the card, expiry date, and security digits are correct (and it’s not a nicked card), it will process and authorise regardless of the billing address.
BA currently accept:
American Express
Diners
JCB
MasterCard
Solo
Switch / Maestro
Visa
Visa Debit (Visa Delta)
Note that all credit cards (even BA’s branded AmEx) are now subject to a booking fee on ba.com (currently 3.00 UKP)
Shareholder discount
Shareholders who hold a minimum of 200 shares or more on a record date in early November each year are entitled to a Shareholder Discount Coupon. This coupon entitles the shareholder and up to five travel companions to a 10% discount on BA flights. Coupons are sent automatically to those shareholders who hold their shares on BA’s register - those holding their shares through a PEP, ISA or in nominee account need to ask their plan manager or stockbroker to apply for the coupon, by e-mailing
[email protected]. Your stockbroker may have a “Perks” department which will handle this sort of request.
Once you have the coupon, which BA distribute in early December each year, you can access discounted fares via
www.bashareholders.com. The shareholders discount cannot generally be combined with any other special offer which is running, and under the terms and conditions, cannot be MFU’d. However various FT’ers have reported success with this, so YMMV
The discount can be used to cut 10% off the price of any published British Airways fare, for a journey from or within the UK, for leisure travel only, subject to the normal terms and conditions. The fares include any British Airways class of travel worldwide - from UK Domestic, Euro Traveller, World Traveller or World Traveller Plus to Club Europe, Club World or FIRST. 'World Offers' fares are also included. Tickets issued through this scheme are no different from regular tickets - the rules, restrictions and conditions associated with the type of fare or holiday package involved, covering such items as advance purchase requirements, still apply. Note that the discount applies to the base fare only – it does NOT apply to any of the taxes, surcharges etc.
It’s also worth noting that if you hold the shares in November, your annual discount will run from 1st January to 31st December of the following year. However, this is the period in which you can
book flights – the travel period can be any point within BA’s normal period of sales (i.e. 350 days in advance). There is no limit to the number of times you can use the discount during the discount period. Note that you do NOT get the discount immediately, so there is no point in buying shares in advance of buying a one-off ticket.
If you do not have a stockbroker, there are a number of Internet stockbrokers available in the UK who can generally set up accounts fairly quickly and easily, and trade equities for a very reasonable £10-£15 per trade. Alternatively, British Airways offer their own service, and various recommended brokers via
www.bashareholders.com
Finally, the discount only applies to private individuals who hold shares, and only to those who hold BA shares listed on the London Stock Exchange. Shares held via the NY listed ADR are not eligible for discount status.
Can I get a refund if the price goes down?
No! BA do not follow this practice which some North American carriers have. If your ticket is not explicitly flexible or refundable, you will not be able to get any kind of refund just because the current market price is now lower – which is quite fair because you wouldn’t like it if BA came calling asking you for the increase if the fare went up.
However, BA
do have a ‘price promise’ in place – if you can find the
exact same fare elsewhere cheaper, BA will refund you the difference. The devil, as usual, is in the detail – specifically proving the booking is exactly the same. This will include the same dates, times, flights, cabin and more importantly booking class/fare bucket too.
Manage My Booking (MMB)
Once you’ve booked a flight, you should get a reference number. It’s called a PNR (Passenger Name Record). It’s a 6 character alphanumeric string, which will start with either, X, Y, Z or 2. MMB will allow you to do the following:
• add your Executive Club number to your booking
• request a seat
• advise dietary requirements
• view, print or email your itinerary
• print or email your e-ticket receipt (if applicable)
• provide Advance Passenger Information for travel to relevant countries (e.g. USA)
• check in online
MMB is a great way of selecting what seats you want to sit in. However, not all seats are made available for selection in advance:
• some are held back to allow seating at the airport
• exit rows are always held back until check-in opens
• some seats (e.g. 1AK in FIRST or Row 1 in Club Europe) are only available to people with the shiniest of cards in MMB
If you’re stuck in less than desirable seats, wait until 24hrs (23 if flying from the USA) before the flight, and OLCI. If you are not able to get your preferred seats (i.e. two together, upper deck, etc.) with pre-selection, it is still highly likely that you can get them using OLCI if you check-in as soon as it opens.
On-Line Check-In (OLCI)
This brings us nicely to OLCI. OLCI is a great tool, but has some limitations.
All users can now check in online from 24hrs before their first flight (or 23hrs if departing from the USA). This applies to Executive Club members, registered users of ba.com or anyone else (so long as they have their PNR and can remember their own surname!) We highly recommend that you OLCI at as close to -24hrs from departure as possible in order to guarantee yourself the best seat. This is especially true if you want an emergency exit row. Despite CAA rules to the contrary, you can get usually book an emergency exit seat through OLCI at -24hrs, even though BA check-in staff have not been able to physically check that you are capable of opening the exit door (though they can always move you at the airport if you’re deemed unfit). When OLCI is finally available for children, it is likely that exit rows will not be available to you if you have a child under 12 in your booking.
If you have a multiple segment itinerary, you will be able to OLCI for all segments from 24hrs before the first one. This means that for some segments, you will be able to check-in greater than 24 hours in advance. This also works if you have a return flight on the same day – i.e. you’ll be able to check in for the return segment 24hr before the outbound.
OLCI on its own, will NOT give you a boarding pass. More and more airports are now using ‘Print Your Own Boarding Pass’ (PYOBP) though. If available, you will be offered this option on the final screen of OLCI.
OLCI looks pretty similar to MMB, but they are totally different web-based application, written by different teams, which interface with different systems. MMB for example, can pick the seats of all the passengers within the PNR. OLCI cannot. You have to OLCI for each passenger separately. This could potentially lead to you picking a seat, doing OLCI, and when you then get to your travelling companion, the adjacent seat being taken by someone else. The way around this is to have two browser windows open.
Recently, BA has added a feature that allows you to check in all passengers on a PNR. This is basically a bodge job, as you still have to go through the process separately for each person, but you don’t have to login and logout of the EC secure area. If you still manage to lose the seat next to you during that short period, once you’ve OLCI’d, you can always go through the entire process again, and move to another seat.
Note: you can OLCI as many times as you wish (e.g. if you’re obsessive about checking for a specific seat you still can’t get, ‘just in case’) normally
but if you PYOBP then you will
not be able to re-enter OLCI once this has been done. So if you end up with the situation where a companion can't sit next to you, you'll have to change seats at the airport.
The ‘Choose your seat’ function will not work on any web browser using the Gecko rendering engine (Netscape / Mozilla / Firefox), nor will it work on Safari. You will need to use IE5/6 for Windows or IE5 for MacOS X.
Sometimes, you may not be able to pick your seat. This could be because the flight is very full, or the airport have taken control of the seating or because OLCI is having a bad day! It is worth waiting a few hours, and going through the OLCI process again, seats may have opened up. You can use OLCI as many times as you want during the 24 hour window. Worth doing on a busy flight as seat availability can change quite a bit.
Historically, if there were children or infants in the booking, NO passenger could OLCI. BA’s (somewhat spurious) reasoning for this was that potentially the child or infant could OLCI by themselves, which would leave BA with an unaccompanied minor on the flight. This is expected to change from summer 2006.
OLCI can be used if you have baggage to check-in. Most airports have a “Fast Bag Drop” (FBD) desk where you can tag the bags, and obtain your boarding passes (if you haven’t already). The advantage of using the FBD desk is that the queue is usually very short (though the more people who use OLCI, the less true this becomes
). At some airports, the FBD desk doubles as the Club/FIRST counter, meaning it’s even quicker. You can also drop your bags at a normal counter if the queue is shorter – the Club line (assuming you have a Silver card or are travelling Club) is often quicker than Fast Bag Drop.
You can OLCI through several routes depending on how you accessed your booking, but a reliable way is to ‘go direct’ – if you know your flight is (or should be open) for OLCI, you can use this link:
https://www.britishairways.com/trave...y/public/en_gb
and simply select your departure point. The system should then find your booking automatically.
Self Service Check-in Machines (SSCI)
Most UK airports, some European airports, and JFK have self-service check-in machines. From these you can select your seat and obtain your boarding passes (with an e-ticket receipt). You don’t need to be an Executive Club member to use them, however it does speed things up. The machine will also normally require you to insert the credit card the booking was purchased with. There are usually a few staff milling around to help customers with them, however they are very straightforward and easy to use.
If you are travelling on a UK Domestic flight, it is now compulsory to use the SSCI machine. If you have baggage, it should be checked in at a ‘Fast Bag Drop’ desk. Unfortunately, this is now likely to have a queue as long as the old-fashioned check-in queues used to be!
Note: if your credit card has expired or been re-issued since you made the booking, this will delay things (and you’ll need to queue at a ticket desk) – it’s always worth holding on to your old credit card if you can for these situations!