FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Odd email from BA: fraud attempt or IT glitch?

Jan 4, 2022 | 3:03 pm

#11

JAXBA

Join Date: Mar 2009

Location: JAX

Programs: Ex-BA/AA/CP/LY staff, BA Blue, IHG Diamond, Marriott Silver, Chick-fil-A Red

Posts: 3,755

Quote:

Originally Posted by 13901

Ah, good old Mont Joli! I had this particular thing pop up a number of time when I still had staff travel with the annual concessions and, as you do, you make a number of bookings before settling in for one specific flight. For some reason then BA would start sending me reminders for my flight to Mount Joli.

I also had this way back at the beginning of the pandemic when I had to can a (real) flight booking. It's some weird gremlin hidden away in Reservations. Whether it's BA, or Amadeus, or a bit of both I've never understood.

Quote:

Originally Posted by T8191

Adding to comfort messages, ISTR we acquired a ghost booking to JFK at some point during our mass cancellations. Never booked NY in my life, and it took a while to disappear from CheckMyTrip too … which suggests it may be an Amadeus thing.

The OP's ghost segment is going to be from RET (I expect meant to be short for RETention, but happens to be the city code for Rost in Norway) to YYY (maybe someone thinking of generic IATA code YY and added an extra Y?). The default preset GK segment entered by Pegasus was for actual JFK flights, like T8191 had, but messages would end up being sent for flights that pax weren't actually booked on, so presumably BA moved to something more generic - RETYYY - that didn't really exist but now raises weird questions. Personally I preferred LONLON as a vanilla dummy segment whenever I had to add one manually.

The Amadeus standard would be just a MIS[C] segment, but BA.com (and Concessions Online) probably aren't be able to display those, so ghost segments are used as well. PNRs stay alive for 3 days past the date of the last segment (of whatever type), so a far flung dummy segment will keep the PNR alive for a long time.

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