On Sunday I tried to book my wife and daughter tickets from Malaga to London, after three attempts and different cards, the attempt failed at the payment stage. I checked the next day with our bank and confirmed that there is nothing wrong with the card/s.

Today I tried again to make the booking and failed again; however this time I phoned the Spanish number for BA - and spoke to a lady in Germany. I explained the situation and she tried to make the same booking and failed - finally she explained that there has been a problem with making payments on the BA website; however, BA cannot now accept my wife's Maestro card (which is accepted by the website) because they can only accept Visa/MasterCard/Amex (my wife does not have a CC) via telephone. I was then told to go to a website such as Expedia to make the booking @:-)

As a long term GC holder, I find her last piece of advice exceedingly shall we say "unwelcome". Whilst I understand the related issues of online fraud, if your system fails to work, then there has to be a competant workaround - clearly this is not the case. After some heated discussion, I am now waiting for BA to call me back with a solution