sxc

@flatlander I think my point was not so much the chatbot, but the fact that there is now automated irrops processing available in Amadeus. Not sure if it's a new feature in Amadeus hence CX and BA introducing it at a similar time, or whether it's a coincidence.

hfly

Yes, the problem is this of course..............The last two times that I have had BA cancel flights on me, specifically the first of a connecting flight, once in Y once in J. The helpful notice that I received from BA was to log in and they would take care of it for me...............and every single option offered was ONLY on BA, which meant in fact flying THE NEXT DAY, which was not at all acceptable way/shape or form. In the case of the Y ticket I phoned in and they attempted the runaround. In both cases, going to the desk at the airport got me immediately FIM's to another carrier, as was in fact BA's responsibility in both cases (there was no weather nor anything else, in fact BA was regularly cancelling certain flights from my destination for weeks, most probably due to loads), My point being is that NOT having ticket desks, and NOT having knowledgeable people, will mean that BA will try to only move people over to BA flights in such circumstances and perhaps not even "know" how to FIM someone onto another carrier!!

callum9999

None of this is really relevant to ticketing desks though. Your suspicion that BA will block transfers to other airlines etc. (are they really required by law? Last I saw it was still a grey area) could happen regardless of whether the desks are still there or not.

cauchy

But -- if BA is to have a 'sometimes rebook onto other airlines' policy, it needs highly-trained staff to use their discretion to decide when to do so, and when not. With the current policy, such staff are definitely needed. If this goes, and it's 'rebook on BA only', then the staff are not needed. Speculating, it might be a case of the staff going *because* the policy will change, rather than the policy changing because the staff are gone.

And as a side note - that it's a grey area that really suits the airlines. I guess few people will simply hand over the credit card to another airline with a view to attempting recovery of thousands of pounds from BA later. The airlines can always pay (with non-disclosure) the even fewer who proceed so there's a real risk of recovery.

corporate-wage-slave

I think it has been mentioned several times already, but FLY / JFE already handles onbooking to other airlines, it doesn't necessarily require ticketing agents to handle that sort of transaction. The reason why they want to phase out the longer established job grade is that they are paid a higher salary than other customer service agents, and indeed a higher salary than ticketing agents on the newer contracts.

There is a more general point that there are a lot of BA agents with long service, some I have known from T1 and T4 days. They have also had new contracts imposed on them, with longer working hours, and so some instead are taking the other option of voluntary severance and will be leaving from September 2019. I guess the risk is that a lot of highly knowledgeable agents with long established customer service skills - ticketing and otherwise - could be leaving BA shortly after the centenary events next year. And that probably is what is going to have the bigger impact overall.

callum9999

Not really. They could very easily create a set of rules (e.g. rebook allowed onto other carriers if no BA flight on the same day/within X hours) if necessary. Then if they don't trust the staff to make exceptional circumstances decisions, it can be referred to a supervisor.

The vast majority of rebookings are surely bog standard and easy. It makes lots of sense to me that the kiosks/"normal" staff can deal with those, then refer the difficult cases upwards.

Yeah that definitely does. With the way the courts have handled the other challenges, it wouldn't shock me if they ruled people have to be booked onto the next available flight on any carrier.

Dave Noble

The more that can be done with kiosks or online , the better. It is also easier to ensure that any policies that the airline has in place are adhered to and reduces chances of a human making mistakes in what they agree to do

There will have to be some people available either at airport or via phone to handle exceptional cases - on plus side too, if people can do things via kiosks, the agents will be able to focus on the complex ones without impacting others queuing waiting for a difficult itinerary to be fixed up

hfly

Of course there are risks already to BA with having the few experienced agents/mangers that they had...........When the IT meltdown happened they simply had too many "kids" and hardly any "grownups" available to deal with the mess. There were in fact dozens of flights that could have departed, that had everyone air side or even boarded that could have gone had there been experienced agents available (ones who know the sticker system, not that it would have necessarily helped as they had few on hand as they had not been ordered for years as it was a "cost saving" (maybe $15k), or know how to calculate the aircraft weight/balance, etc without a computer.................. instead rumour has it that there were less than 8 on site, and they could only get in another nine, while many outstations could in fact get flights out because they had access to more senior people.

I already recently dealt with an incredibly inane old school ticketing problem with BA, that in fact took me DAYS to sort out, because there are literally less than 5 people in teh airline that know hoe to deal with it (not a desk problem, but a problem in general).

hfly

Yes I am sure that they want to do it cheaper, and I am sure that some accountant has figured that they'll save a million a year or whatever. Sort of like the brain surgeons who figured it would be a good idea to get rid of the IT adults, have a couple of kids around and outsource everything else to save maybe 5 million quid over a couple of years...........what did that cost them again? Was it 75, 100 or 130 million quid?

Calchas

I am concerned it may become more difficult to find staff able to do arbitrarily complex ticketing tasks.

Even though scenarios with say manual pricing, or getting other carriers to release inventory that is wrongly closed out, it needs to be looked at by the back office, you want someone who has a direct channel to those people.

sxc

Sixth Freedom

Completely agree. But sadly I doubt that it will ever be possible without disposing of the entire distribution, reservations and ticketing infrastructure, rebuilding from the ground up. SABRE, Amadeus and the hanger on platform vendors like PROS are just too entrenched in the industry and while ATPCO try to be the good guys and move things along all they are ultimately doing is delaying the inevitable massive disruption.

flatlander

Amadeus already has a "rebook onto likely best" option, BA uses it internally. Connecting this to a user-friendly display with a button that says "yes" that then tells Amadeus to do the booking (rather than having a BA CS person read the result to the customer, then type some stuff that causes the ticket to be changed) is not beyond the wit of mortal software developers. BA already has this capability for "Same Day Change" on their website.

Claiming some need for NDC or other reservation-system-rewrites is a prerequisite for "We need to have a kiosk for rebooking during disruption" just isn't true, no matter that it would make a convenient stalking horse for the other reasons for NDC (which are mostly finer control of pricing and availability, thereby making the pricing and availability more opaque and charging each customer more precisely the maximum they will pay; and reduction of GDS fee payments).

cauchy

I'm trying to cancel a ticket. The website isn't playing along:

So I tried calling the call centre. Call got answered pretty much immediately (wow!) and they say their servers are down, and that I should call back in 20 minutes. Hopefully it's a minor blip, or otherwise, things are going to get worse, fast!

It's for situations like these where a physical ticket desk would hopefully solve the problem.

adrianlondon

They would tell you their servers are down and to hang around for 20 minutes before queueing again