I feel sorry for the ex-Head of Digital who was always fighting for investment in the app as a fully-functioning app relieves pressure on call centres, relieves pressure on airport staff, improves customer NPS etc., etc.

I think the real issue here is that the app is the view into the back ends of BA's IT and most importantly its booking and reservation system which is clearly flaky.

Add to that flaky APIs from the reservation system and the BAEC database (customer info) into the app and you have something which can do the basics only once all of the integrations have fired up and are working. No point in trying to build edge-case reservation improvements when you're building on two or more layers of sand in the first place. Hence overloaded call centres, hence calls going unanswered.

I think the app is generally really unimpressive nowadays. It doesn't cache my customer information so always takes 30 seconds to identify me and maybe 30% of the time it can't see my reservations, meaning I can't check in etc online. Other than the feature of making a booking, it means that most of the reasons I have for using the app don't work within acceptable timeframes.