I write this, because it should not be happening in 2025.

I traveled back home on Sunday to AUH. For week’s the flight had been sold out in F, J and W but I had a confirmed seat in W. Upon boarding my first departing flight from GLA I noticed that EF was showing F1 J1 and W1 and lo and behold even the BA app was selling tickets.

An hour later I landed in LHR and EF and the BA App were both still showing avail in J. it was 3 hours until my flight to AUH departed (22:10 departure) so thought I had enough time.

So I pick up the phone to GGL at 1920 hours to try to change my ticket from W to J using cash (it was a revenue booking in W to begin with).


1. The agent saw the availability but took 20 minutes to secure the seat. He then hung up on me.
2. I speak to the CCR Info Desk and ask them if I can change a ticket with them. They said no - no one has that ability at LHR
3. GGL agent calls me back. This is 1955. Explains there is a fare difference and I accept. He says he has to offload me from the flight to be able to change the ticket. I provide card details
through the secure system. He then says he will have to call through to Manchester before they close. The call disconnects.
4. GGL agent calls me back for the second time, at 2015 hours. Says that Manchester was now closed and he has to call through to India. He says this may take some time. The call disconnects, again.
5. By 2100 hours I hadn’t had any call back. So I go back to CCR Desk who then call their fares and ticketing team - they refuse to touch the ticket because India is working on it.
6. Flight closes at 2110. Still not ticketed.
7. Concorde Team step in and start calling everyone they know. They inform Ground Team that I have a ticketed seat in W and a confirmed seat in J and that I need to travel and to keep check in open for me.
8. Concorde Team then call a supervisor and ask to issue me a boarding pass without e-ticket.
9. At 2125 hours I get a call back from GGL - he confirms it has been ticketed and I am in J.
10. 2126 hours I get boarding pass issued and I’m told to run to the gate.

It’s 2025. And this is the state of BA and their IT. The Concorde Team and staff member that night worked their socks off - and said they hadn’t seen anything like it in all their years at BA. I chuckled and said it’s more common than you think.

Tales like this really strike me because this is a failure for a GGL, supposedly one of BA's most valuable customers.

What would the experience have been like if you were BAC Silver? Status-less? BA and IAG are leaving revenue and customer satisfaction on the table daily due to their inability to deal with what should be simple requests.
Don't worry thought, that new Revenue Management and Payments system is coming in 2023, 2024, 2025?

not a good experience. considering the likely cost of such a change and the substantial fare difference, if nothing else ba are missing out on a nice chunk of cash due to this.

this, along with your other recent observations, does rather validate your decision to move your business away from BA and the BAEC/BAC ffp I’m giving up my GGL status.

In general I find the India GGL team exceptional. There was one occasion I got Didsbury around 7.45pm to request a simple change to an Avios booking the following morning, and the agent told me I couldn’t do it as it was a part pay with cash. Which it wasn’t. I simply waited till 8.01pm and the Indian call centre were so switched on, it was done in a couple of minutes. There’s too many times now the agents picking up calls in Didsbury are just not up to the simplest of tasks. If it’s telling me I can’t use a GUF2 into A class, which I then got IAG loyalty to do, it’s always something increasingly unfathomable to them.

KARFA, you’re like the annoying colleague some of us have who digs out an email that you forgot you wrote

(No offence meant to the OP).

as I noted recently, I keep files on everyone https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/37357134-post114.html

to be clear, none of what the OP writes is a good experience. I am not even attempting to defend BA here. But there is a serious point that if you continually find BA is consistently not meeting your expectations on the ground or onboard, it’s not illogical to look at other options (unfortunately I think we can all see BA is not interested in changing). As we have seen, the recent change to bac has been a big motivation for folks to do exactly that.

Didn’t forget I wrote it. Flown QR or other OW airlines 60% of my flights since I wrote that post - with a few EK flights as well. Unfortunately getting to GLA isn’t as easy as it used to be (and I won’t pay for EK J on an A380 again cos it’s like a bloody bus!). I have to go GLA every month - so I’m using the millions of Avios I had mostly to upgrade W fares or Multi Partner Awards.

Next month for example I’m flying QR to DUB and then up to GLA on EI just to avoid BA. But sometimes I can’t avoid it.

I had a similar-ish experience last year at SFO. Was on a TP run so was flying back home via SFO-JFK-LHR-MAD / MAN. At the lounge in SFO I noticed that an upgrade seat in the rare A bucket became available on my flight to JFK. I called the GGL line and the agent could see it but it was taking a long time to process. By this point boarding just started and I informed the gate agent that I was being reticketed from J to F on the flight. She asked for my details and said that I was no longer on the flight and that my seat in J had been given to someone else. The GGL agent still couldn’t reticket me so I ended up missing the flight and having to re-route via ORD back home which als meant spending the night in ORD due to storms. At least tv agent was able to secure my new itinerary.


I learned never to make changes to a ticket close to departure.

To not have entire teams of ticketing-capable staff at your main hub airport where you operate 100's of flights a day is utter madness.

To not be able to change flights and tickets online is utter madness.

I’d tend to agree more on the latter here.

But more to BA’s mindset and culture is that both of these options cost money, end of discussion. It costs time, resources and money to train staff. Equally it costs a great deal of investment to build decent software systems. You can say you’re chucking Ł5...6…7bn, whatever the latest investment figure is that they enjoy printing about for the past 10 years, but is it being invested in decent people on decent wages who know how to build, implement and deliver the systems/services. I think we know the answer to that.

Ironically I wonder if you added up the staff time and resources to resolve the OPs situation and times this by multiple situations per day whether they are actually any better off!

I feel you.
Having very seriously considered a wholesale move to Skyteam/FB Ult earlier in the year, it just wasn't going to work for this EDI resident.
There are just too many OW choices for me (AY, QR, AA all from EDI, even if I am trying to avoid BA), the connection from EDI to an outbound T5 international is too easy and too frequent, and the timings for my flights with BA too good in terms of being able to arrive in time for a day's work.

I will requalify as GGL with the help of bonus TPs and an old BAH booking and a spend of about Ł30k.
But as KARFA suggests, I will re-assess next year in light of however they update the scheme again, and the decision will be based on the facts, not the feelings!

That’s a terrible experience, especially for GGL.

I had a similar-ish issue this week, but with a missed connection.

Late inbound from DFW so missed flight to BUD. Next flight 7 hours later. Was only going for the weekend, so asked them to push our date of BUD flight in lieu of claiming delay compensation.

Agent in India says no problem and no charge, go to desk and get yourself offload and then ring back.

Get offloaded and ring back at which point they say “no change unless you pay”, which is Ł296. They would not relent.

So I went back to desk to get put back on the flight, had lost exit row seat and claimed Ł520 delay compensation.

What a totally asinine way to run a business where refusal to waive a smaller change fee resulted in paying larger delay fee plus I’m angry.

Their tech and policies are not reflective of the spend they want from us.

The only thing that surprises me in the OP's tale is that there seems to be an assumption that things would become better in 2025 than they were in 2024, 2023 etc. My sense on those particular types of issues is that they have become distinctly worse. I don't think it has anything to do with IT either, more about rules, processes, and agents training and roles.

Unfortunately, none of those things are either moving in the right direction or any realistic change of moving in the right direction in months to come.

Incidentally, I agree with one of the posters above that however sad that makes me feel, and notwithstanding a few absolutely brilliant Didsbury agents, as a whole, the Mumbai team is now distinctly better (and more willing) than the Didsbury one. Again, a few of the (particularly more experienced) GGL team agents in the UK are truly excellent, but they are now part of a far larger and far more heterogeneous pool compared to before.

It’s a crazy decision and I can’t fathom how it saves money.

They have a bank of phones for you to ring ticketing by the check-in desks in T3, so you can ring in while 10 airport staff stand around doing nothing.