Crastonts

I don't know why, but suddenly my web reservation is completely blocked out (all greyed out) and I cannot do any changes whatsoever.

The system asks me to call them, which I have done for ancillary purposes but at the cost of long waits, and much more expensive quotations for upgrades and seat selection.

Telephone service is completely useless, other than: "yes but we can help you here". I am sure they love to help me through the phone if they tack service charges for everything that do not exist when doing changes online!!!!!

The Twitter bot/DM and the normal complaint system are useless.

How do I escalate this so that I can be taken seriously?

Thanks

jerry a. laska

Telephone wait times have been nonexistent for my last few calls; I have usually called at ~ 7pm GMT.

If you are unable to make the change online, BA usually will not charge the telephone fee. I'm not sure why upgrading using avios would be more expensive when calling otherwise. Others have reported success using Twitter.

KARFA

Hi Crastonts. This is certainly quite unusual. Have you any idea why that might be? Have there been any issues with this booking? Is it a simple cash booking? BA flights?

What changes are you trying to do at the moment? The call centre wait times are not too bad at the moment. and as noted offline service fees should be waived if you are prevented from doing something online that you should be able to do.

When you called were they able to explain why your booking was blocked from changes online?

Crastonts

Hi there. This is a fairly vanilla W reservation with a credit card, no Avios involved -- LHR-MEX return, and I've now flown the first leg.

When I asked customer support why they would block me, they said it was because I chose to upgrade online the first leg to J (which worked seamlessly, no complains there). As a result of this, the reservation will now be blocked by their system. Bizarre.

I wonder if telephone prices are really the same than those online. Anecdotical of course, but I paid 500 GBP to upgrade to J in the first leg, and out of curiosity asked how much it would be to do the same for the return leg: 1300 GBP + service fees

KARFA

Thanks for this. When are the flights out of interest? I don't need extract dates but are we talking next week, next month, 2022?

When you first did an upgrade was this a price shown online like this on manage my booking?



It sounds like the first upgrade could have been a promotional upgrade price of Ł500 which is usually a fixed price offering.

In terms of the upgrade quote for the return it sounds more like you are looking at a fare difference - so there is no promotional upgrade offering. if that's the case then that is unfortunately the price to upgrade - if you don't want to pay it (and I wouldn't for that upgrade) then that is the end of it. You can keep checking MMB as sometimes a promotional upgrade will be offered at some point. Do you want to upgrade for the Ł1300?

In terms of the blocking I am not sure I buy the reasoning they have given you tbh. I assume you got a change email once you did the upgrade with the new ticket number on it? I had a search for previous mentions of similar problems and found this. Access to booking blocked on App and BA.com

It seems if someone or something was trying to access my booking with incorrect details it locks out. If this is the case the agent on the phone should be able to unlock it.

Crastonts

This is very interesting. The return flight is in 6 weeks, but this all started because I need to change my flight and I don't think I should pay a "telephonic convenience fee" or w/e.

It seems the original upgrade was a special offer indeed. I don't think 1300 GBP for a J upgrade is a good deal, let's see if they offer something else later on.

So... for the time being, I'll probably call again and insist they unblock my reservation.

Thanks!

BA6501

Isn't this just... ba.com being odd, and any booking that gets taken out of the self-service channel (changes over the phone, previous changes online, etc, etc) mean that a call is necessary for... anything?

corporate-wage-slave

Yes, this is correct.

POUGs are self service instruments, and once you have taken a reservation out of the self service channel then self service tools mostly stop working. Almost any telephone intervention can lead to a ticket leaving self serve. A POUG on its own won't but making time and date changes or anything that requires manual fare ticketing. The possible exceptions being seat changes and extra baggage payments, which are handled on a specific Altéa module and are therefore more robust. It's been this way since this way since the day BA introduced online access to reservations. Generally speaking, this is getting better, so the idea that you could change dates and flights online at all was a fantasy and now it mostly works. Flyertalkers are a breed apart, most people make a reservation, pay with cash, go from here to there and back, and perhaps make one change. Many FTers have more complex trips and so I think we see more bookings taken out of self serve than the general population.

So it's not new, the system isn't "blocking" you, yes it is a bit irritating, but usually you can avoid the telephone service fee if you are trying to do something that usually is in self serve. Agents have an emulation of your screen so can quickly verify that you are indeed having a problem and so can waive fees. POUGs are in a category of their own here since conceptually they aren't supposed to involve human intervention. There are plenty of other scenarios where POUGs won't appear, including when you mix fare categories or currencies (the online calculation falls over at some point).

There is nothing an agent can do to put you back into self service. Everyone in BA would prefer reservations to stay in self service since on dozens of aspects self service reserations are much easier to deal with, including auto-ticketing. We often see complaints here about tickets not issued and that typically is because it needs to be queued off for manual intervention and there is almost always a backlog in the back office. Airline ticketing is a ramshackle process due to the dozens of computer systems that have been used over the years to get to the current edifice. You wouldn't start from here, as they say, but it would be a daunting prospect to say "we rebuild ticketing from the ground up" as opposed to patching the existing infrastructure - that would be a mammoth and risky project.

PUCCI GALORE

One never ever comes here without learning something. I had no idea about any of this, but the ticketing issue is fascinating. Is this why BA;s system is so idiosyncratic because of all these old systems that ran before?

Duck1981

Rebuilding new systems is risky, but not impossible (and very expensive, which is very likely the key blocker at the moment).

I remember how impressed I was starting to use the AA app for the first time and I saw what that app can do in comparison to the BA app (of course the tail registration feature of incoming airplanes impressed me most as Avgeek)

Confus

Essentially, yes. What may look to a customer like modern e-ticketing is processed exactly the same behind the scenes as the handwritten paper tickets of ye olden times. If you think about all of the different players in airline ticketing, from airlines themselves to travel agents, GDSs, IATA, ATPCO, and of course other airlines, it’s easy to see where the complexity arises. It’s also why LCCs can do everything so much more cheaply - by stripping out all of that complexity, they don’t need anywhere near as much development work. But for legacy/network airlines to work properly, it all has to be there in the background.

IMO the OP simply adds yet another case to my argument that FT is completely divorced from the real world. He used words such as ‘random’ and ‘vanilla’ but then proceeded to tell us exactly how he made his booking complex enough to require manual intervention

Anonba

I think its important to clarify the difference here. If the booking is locked because of entering an incorrect name/Reference Manage My booking would be unavailable to access at all, however this can usually be unlocked if you call.

Alternatively if you are able to access Manage My booking but then arent able to change online this isnt something that can be unlocked.

Something as simple as having changed the booking before in terms of flight date/upgrade or having taken a flight can cause this, its a system limitation.
The only way to then make changes is to call.