BA.com error message: We don't sell tickets for 2020
 

I've just tried twice to make a booking for later this month. As you know, the home page only asks for date (not year) because airlines don't sell tickets for more than one year in advance.

Twice in a row, BA.com has taken me to this error message;

"Sorry, it is only possible to book flights to 355 days in advance. Please select an alternative date within this range"

Below, it lists my desired itinerary, only showing my dates and the year 2020.

Is this happening to anybody else?

It is astonishing, is it not, that an airline that won't even invest in a website that is even fit for the purpose of generating revenue through basic, straighforward transactions, happens to be the same one that has been caught out with vulnerability leading to the theft of my credit card information and personal data, and those of hundreds of thousands of other customers.

I've had something similar a few times lately. When booking, the calendar automatically seems to go to this month in 2020 and I have to click back through each month until I get to the current month. Very annoying.

Not had the issue, just checked for the end of Sept with random locations

I think one of the most worrying things is that the website response is inconsistent - sometimes I get the error described above and sometimes everything proceeds smoothly. I struggle to understand how that can happen on a properly coded website when the variables at my end are fixed - same computer, same browser and same enquiry. The real concern however is that I doubt that BA understand why these things happen either - and there are a number of recurrent errors reported here and elsewhere.

There's your answer. IF the website had been properly coded...

Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

I've had this recently, along with various other issues with inconsistent flight options etc... Advice on here was to use the multi-city link and then hope it routes you via the old search pages (although more recently this has been directing me to the new pages). Very frustrating, it must be impacting on sales.

I certainly hope it does! Granted, we're often a captive audience here, but I've certainly gone to *A carriers twice since the new website was launched, after BA.com repeatedly refused to price my itinerary.

Yes, I have seen it as well. Datepicker in new layout gets hickup sometimes. I had one example where there were a possible "confusion" in laguage-settings/locale somewhere so date formats get mixed up. 2018-12-20 --> 20/12/18 (US-style) --> 2020-12-18 etc. when going via several pages.

I also got completely stuck without the possibility to search for any flights due to "Invalid date"

During the weekend, I made 8 reservations with BA. Tree of these required manipulation to escape the 2020 black hole. Annoying and time consuming.

Yup, these errors that occur haphazardly throughout the website tell you everything you need to know about BA's systems. There will be further high-profile failures, you can bet on it.

I suspect that, if the members of the Board had not considered spending five minutes on BA.com to be beneath them, AC would be gone by now.

I've been hitting the same issue along with an issue when booking flights from Glasgow to XXX via London, In the latest case Berlin, where only a subset of the usual flights with connecting options were displayed. I had to use the multi city search to get all possible connections and choose from those. Even that started throwing an error at one point and I eventually found a way around it by booking a flight and hotel package, and re-selecting the flights I wanted from the package search screen. Fortunately I was looking to book a package anyway!

I've been hitting these kinds of errors too; incomplete lists of available flights between London Heathrow and Edinburgh, itineraries between Newcastle and Singapore not showing on BA11 and BA15, but only offering options via Hong Kong with Cathay, or Kuala Lumpur with Malaysia.

That, and the 2019/2020 calendar default and subsequent error.

I note that the comparison sites are not returning results from ba.com on the affected itineraries either, so British Airways will be losing traffic from these sources.

But they recently released a new website — that's when the main problems started for me at least. The old one was clunky and looked old, but was a lot more functional.