ella2001

Some of you may have been following my saga (in another thread) of the mistakenly cancelled flights for our skiing holiday, now resolved. It ended with ever helpful FTers advising me that if asked BA should allocate a seat for my son who was by now on a different PNR. All has been sorted out and my son is now next to me on the UD on Sunday. Thank you for that.

However, in the course of all of that came a rather frustrating conversation with BA, amusing in hindsight, which I thought justified a new thread. It went something like this:

Me: "I'm a gold card holder travelling to Canada at the weekend with my 12 year old son in Club. He's on a different PNR and only has a blue card so we can't select his seat on line but as I am gold and he is travelling with me I believe you can pre-select a seat for him next to me.

BA lady: Do you have the PNRs?

Me: [gave them]

Ba lady: I need to speak to you son. Is he with you?

Me: [bear in mind it was 11am on a week day] Unfortunately not, he's at school.

BA lady: I can't do anything to his booking without speaking to him.

Me: But he's a 12 year old child, I am his mother and I only want to book him a seat.

BA lady: I can't do anything without speaking to him. He is on a separate booking reference.

Me: Yes I know. But he's a child and only on a different booking reference because he's on a slightly different fare bucket to save us money. The bookings were made at the same time.

BA lady: I can't do anything without speaking to him. [conversation continues along these lines for a bit during which time I am tempted to enlist one of my male colleagues to impersonate son and might have done so if I hadn't already admitted son was at school]

Me: But please check his profile on BA.com. It will show you that he is 12, he has the same surname as me, (and its an unusual one), the same address as me, is part of the same household account and he's booked travelling back with me too.

BA lady: But even if I could change his booking, I can't allocate him a seat as he is only a blue cardholder

Me: But he's travelling with me and as a gold cardholder I think I am entitled to select a seat for any travelling companion whether they are a child or not

BA lady: I have never heard of that but even if that is the case I can't touch his booking unless I speak to him

Conversation continues in this circular manner way for a further 10 mins or so. Just before I loose the will to live, BA lady is eventually persuaded to "check with a colleague" (only following me giving her a huge ladder to climb down with lots of "would you mind just double checking ?" and "just in case there has been a rule change" type comments from me) but is pretty reluctant

I am put on hold for no more than 2 minutes so whatever she is doing is not taking her very long.

BA lady returns: "Your son is now next to you in 62J" No further explanation.

So what was all that about then?

CT-UK

[QUOTE=ella2001;9442353]Some of you may have been following my saga (in another thread) of the mistakenly cancelled flights for our skiing holiday, now resolved. It ended with ever helpful FTers advising me that if asked BA should allocate a seat for my son who was by now on a different PNR. All has been sorted out and my son is now next to me on the UD on Sunday. Thank you for that.

However, in the course of all of that came a rather frustrating conversation with BA, amusing in hindsight, which I thought justified a new thread. It went something like this:

Me: "I'm a gold card holder travelling to Canada at the weekend with my 12 year old son in Club. He's on a different PNR and only has a blue card so we can't select his seat on line but as I am gold and he is travelling with me I believe you can pre-select a seat for him next to me.

BA lady: Do you have the PNRs?

Me: [gave them]

Ba lady: I need to speak to you son. Is he with you?

Me: [bear in mind it was 11am on a week day] Unfortunately not, he's at school.

BA lady: I can't do anything to his booking without speaking to him.

Me: But he's a 12 year old child, I am his mother and I only want to book him a seat.

BA lady: I can't do anything without speaking to him. He is on a separate booking reference.

Me: Yes I know. But he's a child and only on a different booking reference because he's on a slightly different fare bucket to save us money. The bookings were made at the same time.

BA lady: I can't do anything without speaking to him. [conversation continues along these lines for a bit during which time I am tempted to enlist one of my male colleagues to impersonate son and might have done so if I hadn't already admitted son was at school]

Me: But please check his profile on BA.com. It will show you that he is 12, he has the same surname as me, (and its an unusual one), the same address as me, is part of the same household account and he's booked travelling back with me too.

BA lady: But even if I could change his booking, I can't allocate him a seat as he is only a blue cardholder

Me: But he's travelling with me and as a gold cardholder I think I am entitled to select a seat for any travelling companion whether they are a child or not

BA lady: I have never heard of that but even if that is the case I can't touch his booking unless I speak to him

Conversation continues in this circular manner way for a further 10 mins or so. Just before I loose the will to live, BA lady is eventually persuaded to "check with a colleague" (only following me giving her a huge ladder to climb down with lots of "would you mind just double checking ?" and "just in case there has been a rule change" type comments from me) but is pretty reluctant

I am put on hold for no more than 2 minutes so whatever she is doing is not taking her very long.

BA lady returns: "Your son is now next to you in 62J" No further explanation.

So what was all that about then?[/QUOTE]

It's about BA and any airline for that matter not being able to dicsuss antoher passengers booking with anybody else without their concent.

If you were on the same booking the not a problem, if his booking was noted with you as an authorized person then no problem.

I understand that the mother / child is a bit of a differnt case but what if say a seperated parent didn't want their kid to travel or something like that.

I have has the same with my wife and she just needed to call.

DocH

Duff Agent or deliberate wind up?

I think the best tactic in cases like this is to save ten minutes by thanking them for their advice and hanging up. Phoning back would then get you someone else who would most likely do what they should.

This was so obviously nonsense that the agents must have been having a boring day and decided to see who could do the most ridiculous wind up.

If this was really a duff agent, I suppose your call was educational for her in the long run and someone else might not have to suffer.

ella2001

Is this "authorised person" status something I should make a point of asking my travel agent to put in the booking if we ever end up on different PNRs again?

I can see what they may be trying to do but with a child this makes no sense. First, what if I couldn't get my son to call (eg if he was at boarding school as he will be in September) and second how much sense is a child going to make on the phone on their own?

Son: "My Mum says I have to phone you and ask you if you will book me a seat"
BA lady: "I can't as you are only a blue cardholder"
Son: [keen to get off phone and get back to playing football/torturing younger sibling/watching Simpsons/seeking out more food etc] "Ok thanks 'bye."

A parent would have to stand next to their child and tell them what to say anyway, so presumably could potentially be coercing them? Thus the rule doesn't prevent the potential harm they are trying to address.

Jenbel

So far as I am aware, there are no provisions within the DPA for giving out information to family members. When I was trying to sort out some things on a reservation my mother had, phoning up and saying that I was her daughter would not have helped - so I phoned up and pretended to be her - which was fine until they asked for my DOB - well i know date and month, no idea of year!

It sounds like you had an agent who followed the rules that BA rightly have.

Have you TCP'd your reservation onto your son's?

clubman

For the future never waste your time (unless you have nothing better to do) on agents that refuse to do what you want them to.
Hang up and try again, if the second agent refuses as well, thank them, hang up again, and try a third, and if the third one refuses then you are obviously asking for the impossible.

I had no problem calling up a few weeks ago and as a Gold card holder asking them to link Mrs. Clubman's booking to mine (she's a Blue member) and assign her 62J next to me.
Took all of 30 seconds...

vla

Insanely ridiculous if you obviously were the parent/legal guardian of a minor. What if the child was, say, half his age. "Hello there I'm a strange lady on the telephone, do you want to sit with Daddy up on the big big aeroplane? Welllllll, I need to hear it from you big boy! I've got a seat for you but next time do us a favour darling and have daddy link the PNRs or make them all in one booking, it's really tiring for me you see."

heartybob

It didn't seem to me that the OP was actually asking for any information about her son, or that the DPA had any relevance to her simple request for her son to be moved so that he could sit next to her.

Suppose the son had been 6 years old instead of 12 - would the agent still have insisted on speaking to him instead of his mother?

It's understandable why organisations will err on the side of caution when handling personal data, but this example just serves to highlight how the imposition of blanket policies can result in unintended consequences.

That said, rather than waste time debating the issue, the usual advice, as has already been said, is to ring off and call again.

BAHumbug

Yes, but your mother is an adult and responsible for her own affairs.

The OPs son is clearly a minor and the other observations about estranged parents wanting to cause mischief doesn't really cut it in this case - the agent could clearly see that the mother and child were travelling on the same flight.

I really think this was a case of a jobsworth agent who made a mistake and wasn't prepared to admit to it. As others have said - thank them for their time, hang up, redial and speak to someone sensible instead if it happens again.

I do hope this is the last of the saga for you ella2001 !

BAH

lhrworker

its called data protection which BA is very hot on

BA staff do not even give out details to the police, immigration or customs. They are told to give them the phone number for asset protection and then they woujld have to go from there.

Just a formality.....

NSFU

The DPA would not prevent BA from dealing with someone re another person's booking if they had good reason to believe that that person was acting with appropriate authorisation - as they would, for example, with a travel agent. In this case it is clear that such good reason exists. It is not the DPA that therefore constrains BA in this case but their own regulations. I cannot imagine that there are blanket restrictions of this kind - would they require to speak directly to a 2-year-old about their booking?

vla

I'm sorry but with respect, the point being made at present is not one of data protection law per se. A parent is the responsible person for a minor travelling onboard. Surely a 14 year old would not be accepted for travel alone, without BA assuming an in loco parentis function, eg. Skyflyers. Thus because the parent is the responsible person for the child, the parent is authorised to undertake actions on behalf of their minor child, particularly something so pedestrian as facilitating a way for a blue (minor child) to sit next to a gold (parent) thanks to the current seating policy.

knifeandfork

I'm sure the Data Protection Act has been revised since I was bound by its strictures in the mid 90s. Immediately after leaving university I worked on the billing information line at BT.

The approach that was drilled into us was that we had to take reasonable steps to ensure that a customer's information was protected. This meant, however, you could drive a London Bendy Bus sideways through some of the holes in the logic.

Michael Buerk used to top up his BBC newsreaders salary by fronting terrible in house training videos we had to watch. If you thought his delivery was sometimes unnecessarily dramtic on "the Nine", as it was in those days, then you should have seen these: he really let rip. The "nightmare" scenario was that a mate in a pub asked as CSR to pull some info on an ex-girlfriend. On seeing that the ex was now regularly calling someone she may or may not now be doing the sex with, the mate loses it, goes round her house and murders her to death.

This never happened to me. So I was given something else to worry about. Even if someone rang up with a phone number and a corresponding, 8 digit account number I couldn't give them any information if their voice did not match the gender of the person named on the bill. So no wives could get call histories of errant husbands, for example. But if you matched the gender then I could take your word for it that you were who you said you were.

Job done, DPA satisfied.

number_6

The underlying issue is that the airline cannot confirm that a specific pax is traveling and must do due diligence. Hence the rule about not discussing a booking except with the pax or their authorized representative (my PA runs into this a lot). However the fact that you knew the PNR and surname meant that you can display the booking on the web, hence the airline is now released from the due diligence obligation. At this point the normal rules kick in. The first agent didn't realize this allowed for the seat change, asked a colleague and was given the right advice. Your scenario worked perfectly, except that there were a few too many repetitions of the "we know nothing about this pax" loop. Fwiw, many countries have laws that require this behaviour by the airline (most famously the EU data privacy laws, which prevented airlines from giving the info to the US govt until a loophole was found). Bottom line is that you will have this problem every time that the PNR is separate and not set up properly.

voracious violinist

Number_6: Does your PA run into a lot of problems with these issues when dealing with your travel? I frequently have to alter/confirm etc complex travel details of musician clients and even with authorisation, loads of identifiable info such as PNR, passport number, address etc etc - one frequently hits a brick wall similar to that faced by the OP, especially with any British airlines, including BA. It is kind of frustrating when a customer services person says "Why can't he phone me himself?" and the answer is "Because he is currently stuck 30K ft up on your flight which is running 6 hours late..."