flyingmonkie

I've been a lurker for years but I've finally been wound up so much by BA that I need to ask a question!

Last week on Thursday my colleague was making multiple bookings for multiple colleagues for a trip to Singapore.

She had a colleague's flight (call her D) on hold from the UK to Singapore and was attempting to make a booking for another colleague (called P) from Sydney to Singapore. My colleague was trying to make a booking for P... the booking was processed and my colleague received a refund confirmation for a hold flight. This concerned her as she was trying to book a flight separately to the flight on hold. At the time she did have multiple browser windows open though which could have led to a session confusion on the part of BA's booking systems.

Because of this concern and aware of the 24 hour cooling off period my colleague immediately contacted customer services in Australia (around 11:35am on the Thursday) and explained the situation and asked them to check whether the booking for LHR to SIN had been made. She was assured that the booking had NOT gone through and there were NO OTHER BOOKINGS on the payment card.

My colleague then made the correct booking for P to fly from SYD to SIN. Later that evening we received the e-ticket confirmations for the two flights, both in the name of P, one from SYD and the other from LHR to SIN on the same dates. These were not checked until the Friday evening (my colleague does not work on Fridays) and we discovered the mistake which we had been assured had not happened, had happened.

My colleague sent an email on Friday evening pointing this out. We have yet to receive a reply to this email.

On Monday morning my colleague explained the situation to me and I called BA Customer services expecting the confusion to be easily sorted out and a full refund issued. How wrong could I be! 55 minutes later I was being SHOUTED at by a floor supervisor in the call centre despite me not raising my voice at all. I asked the supervisor not to shout at me, explained that I wanted her to process the refund (as per fare conditions which is all was offered) and I would then be making a complaint about both the original issue and also her attitude. She then hung up on me without processing anything. I have since processed the refund online leaving us about £1000 out of pocket.

I've submitted a complaint... is there anything else I can do at this point in time?

Mwenenzi

Can you list in bullet points what bookings were made and from where to where by whom (without the rhetoric)? Your post is not that clear
As far as I know there in no "24 hour cooling off period " for airfares booked in Australia (unless it part of the fare t&c's?)
The reservations were made by you/colleagues on a computer

flyingmonkie

Sure:

Flight held LHR - SIN - No Name
Flight booked in error - LHR - SIN
Phone call to BA
Correct flight booked - SYD - SIN

5 hours later 2 x E-Tickets Arrive

Edit to add: 24 Hour Period is BA: http://www.britishairways.com/travel...b?p_faqid=3329

agehall

According to your revised post, your colleague did book the LHR-SIN flight, which was not very clear from the first post. That complicates your position quite a bit. Not sure you have much recourse here tbh.

I typically recommend people to stay as far away from travel agencies as possible, but one thing that is even worse is to have a random colleague act as a travel agency. If you use a half decent TA, they will be able to make a reservation, have you check and confirm it is correct and then issue the tickets. Typically they can also hold reservations for 72h before they need to issue tickets. I recommend looking into this to avoid future problems.

flyingmonkie

Yep the flight was booked in error (it now turns out). Then immediately phoned BA as she was concerned this had happened. BA confirmed on the phone that no flights had been booked.

And this is not a "random colleague" this is my operations manager who regularly does this as we are frequently taking teams of 6 or so to different places around the region. We've used travel agencies in the past but they tend to be more hassle than they're worth unless doing something complicated like weird routing.

JAXBA

I still don't get it either. A booking on hold, a cancellation email, and somehow a booking made in error?

And then expecting a '24hr' refund some 48-72hrs later?

flyingmonkie

OK, to try to clarify:

1100 on Thursday a booking from LHR - SIN was unintentionally made in the name of the wrong person (my colleague is still convinced this was due to an error on the website due to multiple windows rather than human error)
1135 on Thursday a phone call to BA who said that the above booking had NOT been made.
1830 on Thursday email confirmation of the above booking comes through but not dealt with by phone call until this morning as nobody in office.

My point of complaint is that we were told that the booking which was made in error had not been made. If we were told the truth (i.e. the booking had been made) then we would have immediately cancelled it for a full refund.

Edit to add: The fact that we were told the booking didn't exist was confirmed today on the phone by BA, they have a record of this.

DaveS

You could contact your credit card company. They might issue a refund for this if BA are unreasonable about it.

brunos

I don't understand either.

Not sure what you mean by "my colleague received a refund confirmation for a hold flight". From your timeline, that cancelled no-name booking is not part of the picture. Your colleague then did a new booking for LHR-SIN before 11:35am (time of the call to BA).
Apparently, but details are scarce, you colleague was under pressure and mistakenly put the name of "P" rather than "D" in the new LHR-SIN booking. I am afraid that the confusion created by multiple windows comes from your colleague, not BA IT system.

That error in name could have been corrected within 24 hours (I guess by Friday morning), but it was not. Whether you found the BA supervisor impolite on Monday is beyond the point; this was well after the cooling period for name change had expired.

Your major complain ("original issue") is that your colleague called BA thursday morning to check that the flight on hold had truly been canceled. And clearly it was. Then she was told that there were no other booking un the credit card number. I am a bit surprised that the phone agent could access all bookings done under a credit card number (especially as the ticket had not been issued yet). Maybe your colleague gave "D" name and the agent found no booking under his name as the booking was done under "P". If the new booking had been done before the call, she could have simply given the booking reference to inquire about the status.

It is sad that your colleague did not check the ticketing emails that arrived five hours later, but I find it hard to fault BA.

SilverSkier

If BA have confirmed that the booking did not exist, how can the OP's colleague be left with a cancellation fee? From the information given I am struggling to understand the stance taken by BA. Maybe it's worth approaching BA again to see if they can speak to a different person. Failing that, I agree with DaveS that an approach to the credit card company is the logical next step.

Mwenenzi

There is a time lag between when a reservation is made and the flight is ticketed. That can be seconds to days.
What was exactly asked is important. A person can think they asked one thing but technically it can be another.

Your revised time line does not mention the person “not working Friday” or the weekend.

Like others, I fail to see what BA have done wrong. BA were not operating the keyboard: your people were.

And anyway FT is not BA, so no matter what peoples opinion is here ,it has no effect with BA.

flyingmonkie

The question asked to BA was "I have just received an email saying that a flight I had on hold has had the holding deposit refunded, this is incorrect as I have not tried to complete the booking that the hold deposit relates to. Can you confirm whether there have been any bookings made on the payment card XXX" to which the answer was "There are no bookings in the system for that card."

JAXBA

Hmm, that's a trickier one. I understand what that answer means to the lay person: there are no bookings in the system for that person. Seems to be end of.

Possibly bad choice of words by the agent, who if searching for an etkt that perhaps hadn't been ticketed yet, wouldn't have found anything. Not sure that searching for a PNR by credit card is doable, in which case agent should have asked for name, flight number, date, etc. instead.

Mwenenzi

If the reservation was in the queue for ticketing no charge would have been charged yet. That the emails came later indicates was ticketed some time after the reservation was made.

Yep. You only get a answer to the question asked. Asking about a credit card number charge is unusual. Asking about a PNR, name, flight number is what is normally asked. Also cancelling by someone other than the passenger/travel agent is not normal practise. (Do you want me to cancel your flight by just phoning up the airline?)

corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk and welcome to the BA forum flyingmonkie, it's great to get another new member though I'm sure you would wish the context was better than this. Welcome on board.

Like some of the other posters here, I've struggled with some of the details here too, so I'm wondering if the Contact Centre supervisor you had a run-in with also didn't fully understand the whole story either. I also admit to not being overly encouraged by this incident, because the fact that there are transaction delays with internet purchasing, and that multiple windows is a bad idea for transactions, is scarcely unusual to BA, airlines, or even travel - it's pretty much across the board, and I am sure that is fairly well known now. If you then leave a critical email box unattended for 4 days, knowing this is going on in the background, then I'm afraid that my well of sympathy isn't overflowing.

However, focusing on the positive, the two approaches I would look at is to have another go with ringing up, the key issue is that someone needs to listen to the very first telephone call and see exactly what was said in that to your colleague. If the agent said "I see nothing, but keep an eye out for any emails" then you're at a dead end.

Your bank would be the other approach, since some banks do have a policy to cancel duplicated transactions which seem identical. In fact my credit card compay rather embarrassingly cancelled what they considered was a duplicate payment to a restaurant I go to regularly, the two transactions were identical but both were valid, but I accept it would be unusual for that in a restaurant within 2 minutes of each other.