Originally Posted by
minime1
Customer relations have responded with a blunt but sympathetic answer stating that prices are not valid until the booking is confirmed.
I have since replied to them stating that whats the point of advertising a price when a customer has no chance of buying at that price.
As
Genius1 says, what BA have said is a fundamental part of the ticketing process.
Although you happen to have come across this on a day when the BA booking engine was having problems, it can equally happen on a day when there are no technical difficulties. You saw the price go up because the seats at the cheaper price were no longer available the next day. But this can happen even while you're making a booking on the website when it's working properly. You can ask for a price for a particular flight and get a firm quote, yet still be told at a later step that the seat at that price cannot be confirmed.
In fact, given that the booking engine was having problems that day, it could even be the case that you were being quoted an inaccurate price anyway, with part of the booking engine thinking that cheaper seats were available on flights on which they had actually already sold out. If that were the case, then in truth you wouldn't have missed out anyway.