ceBA stands for Customer Enabled British Airways. This covers a multitude of sins such as the website, manage my booking (MMB), online check-in (OLCI) and the self service kiosks.
Ba.com
Ba.com is (unsurprisingly) BA’s website, allowing you to book tickets for any BA flight. There’s also an area for Executive Club Members.
BA.com has also recently been updated to properly support Macs. Previously, it was coded so badly that you couldn’t even bring up your exec club statement. They’ve ironed out most of the bugs now though. However, they are only supporting Safari under MacOS X. Any other browser is NOT supported. Under Windows, they are only supporting IE. Gecko based browsers such as Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox tend to work mostly (especially since it’s been re-written for Safari support), but some things may not work properly.
If you’re booking a flight that’s a single hop, you’ll be presented with the Fare Explorer to choose your times. It’s an easy colour coded way of selecting the cheapest fare. It’s recently been enhanced to allow you to upgrade either one, or both legs of the flight. If you’re logged in to the Exec Club area, it’ll tell you how many miles you’ll earn too. The fare explorer won’t come up, if you’re booking flights with a connection.
Paying for Flights
It’s a little more of a pain to book flights that don’t depart from your country of residence, but it is possible. In the navy blue bar near the top of the site, the country you selected when you first visited the site will be displayed (for the majority of people it’ll be United Kingdom or USA). Clicking on it brings up a country list, where you can change your starting point.
Proceed through the booking process as normal. When you get to the payment page, the country in the field is irrelevant despite what the website says. As long as the credit card number, name on the card, expiry date, and security digits are correct (and it’s not a nicked card), it will process and authorise regardless of the billing address.
They accept:
American Express
Diners
JCB
MasterCard
Solo
Switch / Maestro
Visa
Visa Debit (Visa Delta)
Manage My Booking (MMB)
Once you’ve booked a flight, you should get a reference number. It’s called a PNR (Passenger Name Record). It’s a 6 character alphanumeric string, which will start with either, X, Y, Z or 2. MMB will allow you to do the following:
• add your Executive Club number to your booking
• request a seat
• advise dietary requirements
• view, print or email your itinerary
• print or email your e-ticket receipt (if applicable)
• provide Advance Passenger Information for travel to relevant countries
• check in online
MMB is a great way of selecting what seats you want to sit in. However, not all seats are made available for selection in advance. In general, about a third of WT, about a half of CW and most of F is available for pre-selection. If you’re stuck in less than desirable seats, wait until 24hrs before the flight, and OLCI. If you are not able to get your preferred seats (i.e. two together, upper deck etc) with pre-selection, it is still highly likely that you can get them using OLCI.
On-Line Check-In (OLCI)
This brings us nicely to OLCI. OLCI is a great tool, but has some limitations.
Executive Club members can check in from 24hrs before the first flight, and registered users of ba.com, from 12 hours. We highly recommend that you OLCI at as close to -24hrs from departure as possible in order to guarantee yourself the best seat. This is especially true if you want an emergency exit row. Despite CAA rules to the contrary, you can get usually book an emergency exit seat through OLCI at -24hrs, even though BA check-in staff have not been able to physically check that you are capable of opening the exit door.
If you have a multiple segment itinerary, you will be able to OLCI, for all segments, from 24hrs before the first one. This means that for some segments, you will be able to check-in greater than 24 hours in advance. This also works if you have a return flight on the same day – i.e. you’ll be able to check in for the return segment 24h before the outbound.
OLCI on it’s own, will NOT give you a boarding pass. Some airports however are trialling print your own boarding pass. They are (as of 22nd October 2004): (list is dry and a moving feast – perhaps say ‘if you can do this, it will tell you when you OLCI’)
• Amsterdam
• Athens
• Barcelona
• Berlin
• Bordeaux
• Cologne
• Düsseldorf
• Edinburgh
• Frankfurt
• Geneva
• Hamburg
• Hanover
• Johannesburg (domestic flights only)
• Lisbon
• London City
• Madrid
• Moscow (DME)
• Munich
• Newcastle
• Nice
• Oslo
• Paris (CDG)
• Stockholm
• Stuttgart
• Tel Aviv
• Vienna
• Zurich
This is still newish, so you may have a few problems going through security with it. However, it should get you all the way to the plane. Places like EDI where they’ve had it longer, should be better equipped than others.
OLCI looks pretty similar or MMB, but they are totally different web-based application, written by different teams, and interface with different systems.
MMB for example, can pick the seats of all the passengers within the PNR. OLCI can NOT. You have to OLCI for each passenger separately. This could potentially lead to you picking a seat, doing OLCI, and when you then get to your travelling companion, the adjacent seat being taken by someone else. The way around this is to have two browser windows open.
Recently, BA have added a feature that allows you to check in all passengers on a PNR. This is basically a bodge job, as you still have to go through the process separately for each person, but you don’t have to login and logout of the EC secure area. If you still manage to lose the seat next to you during that short period, once you’ve OLCI’d, you can always go through the entire process again, and move to another seat.
NB, If you print your own boarding pass, you can only go through OLCI once (as BA's instructions say you can only print it once). So if you end up with the situation where a companion can't sit next to you, you'll have to change seats at the airport.
The choose your seat function will not work on any web browser using the gecko rendering engine (Netscape / Mozilla / Firefox), nor will it work on Safari. You will need to use IE5/6 for Windows or IE5 for MacOS X.
Sometimes, you may not be able to pick your seat. This could be because the flight is very full, or the airport have taken control of the seating or because OLCI is having a bad day! It is worth waiting a few hours, and going through the OLCI process again, seats may have opened up. You can use OLCI as many times as you want during the 24 hour window. Worth doing on a busy flight as seat availability can change quite a bit.
If there are children or infants in the booking, NO passenger will be able to OLCI. BA’s reason for this is that potentially the child or infant could OLCI by themselves, which would leave BA with an unaccompanied minor on the flight.
OLCI is also frequently un-reliable.
OLCI can be used if you have baggage to check-in. Most airports have a “Fast Bag Drop” (FBD) desk where you can tag the bags, and obtain your boarding passes (if you haven’t already). The advantage of using the FBD desk is that the queue is usually very short. At some airports, the FBD desk doubles as the Club/First counter, meaning it’s even quicker. You can also drop your bags at a normal counter if the queue is shorter – the Club line (assuming you have a Silver card or are travelling Club) is often quicker than Fast Bag Drop.
Self Service Check-in Machines (SSCI)
Most UK airports, some European airports, and JFK have self-service check-in machines. From these you can, select your seat and obtain your boarding passes. You don’t need to be an Exec Club member to use them, however it does speed things up. The machine will also require you to insert the credit card the booking was purchased with. There are usually a few staff milling around to help customers with them, however they are very straightforward and easy to use.