dylanks

That’s roughly my experience as well. Once or twice I’ve had to respond to my own email to spur a response after waiting a few days.

MrSimonR

Yes I am. I am talking about lately, the last 2-3 months have seen a significant deterioration in response time. I have had multiple apologies for emails being unanswered, taking 2, 3 or even 4 days to be looked at. Once you have an open enquiry, then they are looked at same day. So the workaround seems to be to reply to an old email enquiry, rather than start a new one.

KARFA

it has certainly been slower than normal at some points over the last few months. however, it does seem to be back to at least next day. i sent one on wednesday around 6pm and another a few hours later around midnight - both replied to on thursday just after midday.

manilaboy

Called the GGL line 5 times in the past week, as MMB is severely lacking in functionality since COVID. Each time I have been delighted with the prompt and friendly service. MMB needs to revert to its pre-covid feature set (change flights, cancel flights without resorting to a phone call)

trains

A colleague of mine a few years ago took on a role of speeding up customer services at a rail franchise because their wait times were quite poor and I think the franchise rules required them to improve. He wanted to get response times down to one minute (so customers would receive responses to Tweets immediately, phone calls answered promptly, etc), which he did within a few weeks (I forgot how long, probably a couple of months). They didn't really recruit many more customer service staff, they just created a kind of triaging system where other Head Office staff or new customer service staff dealt with easy questions and experienced staff members dealt with more tricky ones. One thing he said was that when there was a large backlog, something like half of all inbound messages were customers sending messages again, sending messages with different information as they had tried to resolve their problems, trying other forms of communications, etc, etc.

I don't claim any knowledge of airline customer services (and I imagine many questions are much more complex than with a rail company), but I was impressed at how a change was enacted to improve response time. Given the resources that BA have, the length of time they've had to fix this and the amount of time they've had to recruit, I do wonder whether Sean Doyle needs to really be more honest to customers about what is happening in terms of response times (it's clearly not just short staffing, although that might be a factor) and what the aim is in terms of what BA think is a reasonable time to wait. It may be they've communicated this, but I haven't seen it.

Rubecula

Just noticed that my new GGL card does not have the 0800 number on the back but just a standard London number.

MrSimonR

I can assure you that it is currently 18 minutes. As in right now. While an improvement on 30-40 minutes, it is hardly anything like it used to be. And I wouldn't exactly call 18 minutes "prompt". Of course a change to a jokered booking has to be done manually and this takes up to 24 hours, requiring me to call in again to confirm the change and pay any extra taxes. In reality, it most likely won't be confirmed in 24 hours, so I will need to call again. So probably in all an hour of waiting in call queues to make a simple date change.

Most of our calls are for relatively simple things that just can't be done online, but which we should be able to. That is the problem.

aks120

I phoned the GGL line this afternoon and was straight through to a lovely lady. In fact, I think she answered before the auto blurb had finished telling me I had phoned the GGL line! She also phoned me back as promised later in the day with a confirmation of something.

aks120

LHRagain

Spent 40 mins getting through last night and phoned again this morning as I cannot book seats without paying. An automated message has told me that the priority line is so busy that they cannot take my call, please phone back later! Doesn't seem like much priority to me. I thought the email from Sean Doyle several weeks ago said one of the first priorities was to sort out the waiting times for customer service. If they cannot even do this with the GGL, I don't hold out much hope for the rest!

FlyingGames

I've called 4/5 times over the past weeks and never waited more than 2 minutes on hold. Must be down to timings?

MrSimonR

Current message is "we're taking lots more calls than usual and won't be able to put you through to the team right now, we're really sorry about that, but please try us again later". So you can't through even if you have 30 minutes to listen to hold music.

But at least they are really sorry.

abligh

How do I find the mysterious email address for GGL? It's not on the contact page when logged in to ba.com as far as I can see.

Tobias-UK

This is a relatively new, and most unwelcome, development to the GGL priority assistance proposition. Please feed back your frustration on this. Ideally they should have a ‘call back’ option to ensure contact is always possible.

amt

Got them on the phone in 10-15mins… the regular BA phone line just disconnected with an apology message and AA had a wait of 5-6hours with offers of callbacks that only work for American phone numbers.

I’ll take what I can get these days. The whole airline industry is a mess, no longer offers the service it charges for.

abligh

I'd suggest a simple change: one tier point awarded for each minute on hold. That would be reasonable compensation for the approximately 8 hours I've spent on hold over the last 2 weeks (admittedly for two bookings).