First of all , I hope you all had a nice time over Christmas, if you celebrate that is.

I’ll spare you a rant but let’s just say I have gone a bit greyer over the last couple of days dealing with BA.

I booked an Avios redemption online last Monday on QR in Business for UK-Australia and back in 2025.
so far so good and straight forward. Managed to find another seat from a different origin back to the UK at a different date and I rang up with in the cooling off period.

Oh I have system issues and the system is playing up, please call back later and if you explain you won’t have to pay the change fee due to the system playing up this morning.

Called later in the day, change was made but the agent and this would be sent to the infamous back office for reissuing the ticket and to calculate the difference in taxes and fees, the system could not calculate this although BA.com had no problems finding the fees on a dummy booking.

I was assured all is in order and I would get an e Mail within 48 hrs, then have to call up again to pay the difference or get a refund organised, depending how the taxes pan out from the new Airport back to the UK.

New flights showed in Manage my booking.

since I haven’t heard anything by today, 2 days later I checked the booking again and it reverted the original routing. Rang up straight away and was told “ Oh yes QR cancels sectors after 48 hrs if not ticketed.
I explained and the agent apologised. Luckily the seats were still up for grabs so we changed the booking again, still agent could not work out difference in taxes and fees, they spoke to the back office whilst I am on hold and agent has been copied into an e Mail to the fares office this time.
“this will be sorted by the end of today, do not worry”
I asked if it would be easier to split the bookings in to 2 one ways but “no we can’t do this”

Cue 30 mins later, I check my booking and once again it reverted to the original routing.

Yet another phone call and feeling the need for something stronger than coffee by now, call again and was told that the back office would not deal with this as it’s more than 7 days away that I fly, so the sectors would keep dropping out or get deleted, clearly in less than 48 hrs as stated previously.

More confusion sets in and the agent offers to create a new one way booking from Australia to UK then cancels the inbound sector of the previous booking, splitting the booking into, yes, 2 one ways. Something they can’t do apparently

Plenty of further system log outs and issues I pay for the Australia - UK booking then a refund for the original Australia-UK sector will be processed by the back office. Aaaarrrggghhhhh I just wanted to scream.
Furthermore I had to pay the change fee. When I queried this I was told this could only be waved if we keep trying it as one booking, which seemingly failed before and is most likely to keep failing.

So I replied something to the extent of “ so BA are holding me at ransom for the change fee” which she in a nicest possible way agreed with.

my questions to the FT experts:

-how long to expect to for the refund and Change fee to appear on my Credit Card and tickets being reissued
-at what stage do the credit card details from the booking vanish as it obviously takes more than 72 hours to be processed, if this ever going to be processed, by now I am not holding much hope.
- do I have any recourse in asking for the change fee back as I tried to make changes within the cooling off period?

Many thanks for your wisdom in advance

on the upside calls on the line were answered immediately and without delay