donmeek

My level of frustration with British Airways continues to climb over the simplest of of tasks any local merchant can handle with ease which has occured on multiple occasions and apparently impacts many others as well - including some that have missed their flights entirely over the issue.

The situation I am experiencing (and have experienced on at least six other occasions I can remember in the past) is that I made an online avios reservation several months in the future - purchase made in late fall of 2017 for travel in September of 2018 in this case - with one of the long haul segments in First and the return in Club World. The ticket is issued without issue and payment processed with my credit card within a few hours - no problem. A couple of months later just after the New Year I call in to upgrade the Club World segment to First with minimal change in taxes, a change fee, and additional avios all as expected.

Now the fun begins, British Airways only holds the security code (CVV) on credit cards for a week before it is dropped from the system as a payment industry security practice to avoid release of that information in the event of a potential cyber incident - and not a bad practice to have if you can actually process the transaction within that time frame. However British Airways has no capability to actually process a transaction within a 7 day period and every fortnight over the last three months I have received an email and a phone call from British Airways urgently asking me to contact them to provide the CVV again - always after a lengthy list of security questions because heaven forbid someone provides them a correct 3 digit matching security code without knowing the passport numbers of all traveling passengers while at lunch, moving on the street between meetings, etc. I believe I am now on the 7th iteration of spending 20-30 minutes with BA customer service providing the credit card security code to have the revised ticket issued with it taking longer than a week before they even attempted to process the payment before the CCV dropped out of the system yet again.

Even the smallest high street merchant realizes that actually accepting payment in a timely manner is a good business practice and constantly tying up resources in re verifying payment information and frustrating customers who wish to provide revenue to the merchant is, as an understatement, somewhat counterproductive. There have even been reports in Flyertalk of customers who completed everything they thought necessary to change a flight including providing billing information and were never contacted by BA prior to their flight and have no idea a new ticket number was not issued due to this issue until they arrive at the airport or have one segment of their flight unticketed and only find out at the last minute when there is no alternate availability.

I have never dealt with a merchant who over a three month period of repeated attempts was physically unable to process a simple payment request - on multiple occasions with multiple different bookings - absolutely incredible...

Ancient Observer

Joseph Heller would be proud of BA.
Shame he didn't know about this when he wrote the book.
Market stalls can take instant payments nowadays. BA find it somewhat difficult. (That's Brit-speak)

subject2load

@donmeek - I can only hope that you don’t, at some future point, find yourself with cause to apply for a refund for whatever reason (viz recent thread : “Involuntary downgrade - how long for a refund ?”)

Fitch

I find it remarkable that a company as cost-conscious as BA is so poor at managing cashflow.

No doubt they have crunched the numbers on CoC vs IT investment depreciation though and deliberately take this stance, but it seems a funny way to run a railroad

rossmacd

Or if customers do call up to chase up ticketing, you get the lies that they tried to call/email you. This especially infuriates me most - please don't lie to me - just tell me that you haven't called/emailed.