I picked up my new DONE4 from the BA ticket desk at IST airport yesterday, and it was a quick and painless process. I had communicated with BA sales staff by e-mail (not sure who – they never signed a name to their messages other than “BA Teleales”) once I had my reservation established with BA’s RTW desk. I sent them a scanned image of my credit card and passport, and they had the ticket issued and waiting for me at the airport.

I had flown in late the night before and crashed in an airport hotel, but a same day turn around wouldn’t have been a problem, as there was no paper work to do – just a short queue to get to the BA ticket window, show my passport and get handed a fat envelope with my ticket. Walk 30 feet to the Club World check in, and less than 30 min after arriving at the airport I was in the queue for security, and 20 min after than seated in the BA lounge having the first coffee for the day.

The only hiccup – I didn’t study the later flights on the ticket until I was in the lounge, but I discovered my 18 segment DONE4 had grown to 20, with 8 North American segments. What happened is I had e-mailed BA IST to change the dates on the first two flights of a TPA-DFW-LAX-SJU-TPA weekend mileage run. For some reason they have issued tickets for TPA-DFW-LAX on two consecutive days. I figure I will need to get it fixed, but will wait until I have flown a couple more segments and can get the ticket reissued as an E-ticket.

Final price was EUR 4150 base fare plus EUR 470 in taxes – the latter seems high, but not unduly so, and there doesn’t seem to be any real way to tell.