FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - READ THIS FIRST >>> The Ultimate BA Guide!
Old Aug 4, 2007, 3:23 am
  #8  
Shuttle-Bored
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 4,929
BA’s Web Services

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 should now properly support Macs but it only officially supports 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 dates and 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 applicable), and also to allow you to choose the lowest fare which will earn tier points (if logged in to your EC account) Also available if you’re logged in to the Executive Club area is the count of how many miles you’ll earn too for that booking.

If you have a problem or issue on ba.com then we have a very helpful BA staff member on the forum who may be able to help. There are no guarantees for fixes (or response times) but a PM to ba.com helper (who goes by the real name Dilly) may be useful (for both you and BA!).

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. On the current website, you can directly select a different starting destination from the front page. However, if that doesn’t work you can force the issue…

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.

BA currently accept:

American Express
Diners
JCB
MasterCard
Solo
Switch / Maestro
Visa
Visa Debit (Visa Delta)

Note that all credit cards (even BA’s branded AmEx) are now subject to a booking fee PER PERSON on ba.com (currently GBP3.50) If you change your country to something other than UK before booking, you will find that this fee does not appear …..

If you collect Air Miles (as opposed to BA Miles) you may want to consider booking revenue tickets through the airmiles.co.uk website as you will receive a handful of Air Miles as a reward for using the site. Your e-ticket confirmation email will include the BA booking locator which will allow you to pull up your booking in Manage My Booking on ba.com and add your BAEC number. This will not allow you to MFU your ticket, though. Alternatively, websites such as quidco.com offer cashback if you book flights through Opodo, Expedia and similar sites – for expensive tickets, the cashback can outweigh the booking fees charged. No UK cashback website currently offers a rebate for booking flights on ba.com as far as we know.

Functionality to select “lowest price flight earning tier points” presents itself only once you have logged into BA.com

Does BA Have a 24-hr "Cooling Off" Period if I Make a Booking Error?

The word from BA is that there is currently no official, global policy on this - though one is being worked on. So the response you get may differ between 'home' regions. In the UK, the official line at the current time is that refunds/cancellations for non-refundable tickets will not be allowed but changes to the names or flight and/or dates may be (provided it's an all-BA operated itinerary). The best advice is to politely ask the question if you get in to this situation and see if the call centre can help you - but bear in mind the scope of what can be done is likely to be very limited. Actually, the very best advice of course is to be very careful before hitting 'Confirm' and triple-check everything

Check out prices on the AA website as well as on BA.com

Savings can sometimes be made by booking via the AA website (www.americanairlines.co.uk) rather than the BA website as not only are taxes generally less but the AA site sometimes has access to discounted fare classes not available via BA.com due to booking from a different ‘point of sale’ inventory pool. Just click on the oneworld option to be sure you get BA flight prices as well as AA ones. For those looking to gain extra miles by paying with their BA AmEx cards, sorry, the flights will post as AA rather than BA spend.

Can I get a refund if the price goes down?

No! BA do not follow this practice which some North American carriers have. If your ticket is not explicitly flexible or refundable, you will not be able to get any kind of refund just because the current market price is now lower – which is quite fair because you wouldn’t like it if BA came calling asking you for the increase if the fare went up.

However, BA do have a ‘price promise’ in place – if you can find the exact same fare elsewhere cheaper, BA will refund you the difference. The devil, as usual, is in the detail – specifically proving the booking is exactly the same. This will include the same dates, times, flights, cabin and more importantly booking class/fare bucket too.

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 a number (typically 2 or 3). MMB will allow you to do the following:

• add your Executive Club number (or an On Business number) to your booking
• request a seat (if applicable)
• arrange help at the airport if you have mobility or vision impairments
• 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 (e.g. USA)
• check in online

If you’re stuck without the ability to assign seats, wait until 24hrs before the flight, and OLCI.

On-Line Check-In (OLCI)

This brings us nicely to OLCI. OLCI is a great tool, but has some limitations.

All users can now check in online from 24hrs before their first flight. This applies to Executive Club members, registered users of ba.com or anyone else (so long as they have their PNR and can remember their own surname!) We highly recommend that you OLCI at as close to -24hrs from departure as possible in order to guarantee yourself the best seat, especially if you cannot pre-assign one.

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 24hr before the outbound.

OLCI on its own, will NOT give you a boarding pass. More and more airports are now using ‘Print Your Own Boarding Pass’ (PYOBP) though. If available, you will be offered this option on the final screen of OLCI. Note you can now also OLCI multiple people on the same booking at once.

OLCI was recently enhanced to offer a range of options at check-in. In addition to PYOBP, you can now e-mail or fax your BP to the destination of your choice, save as a PDF or opt to collect your BP at the airport via SSCI (see below). The combination of options appears to depend on your departure airport – some will only offer the Print/Collect option.

You can also now OLCI via BA for a number of carriers if your first sector is with BA and you have an onward sector with any of the following airlines -

Aer Lingus
Cathay Pacific
Finnair
Flybe
Gulf Air
SAS
US Airways
United Airlines

Flights need to be on the same booking reference, and the first flight on the booking must be with British Airways. If the BA flight isn't the first flight, then this will not work.

Note: once you have completed OLCI you CANNOT change your seat if you PYOBP. . If you choose to “Collect at Airport”, you will be able to come back into OLCI and change your seat at a later point
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 at least try OLCI as many times as you want during the 24 hour window.

OLCI can be used if you have baggage to check-in. Most airports have a “Fast Bag Drop” (FBD) desk (tellingly being re-branded ‘Bag Drop’ desks these days…) where you can tag the bags, and obtain your boarding passes (if you haven’t already). At some outstations, the FBD desk doubles as the Club/First counter, meaning it’s worthwhile. 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.

You can OLCI through your EC homepage with a direct link (where you’ll then be asked to select your booking) or from within MMB.

Self Service Check-in Machines (SSCI)

Most UK and European airports, and JFK have self-service check-in machines. From these you can select your seat and obtain your boarding passes (with an e-ticket receipt). You don’t need to be an Executive Club member to use them, however it does speed things up. The machine will also normally 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.

If you are travelling on a UK Domestic flight, it is now compulsory to use the SSCI machine. If you have baggage, it should be checked in at a ‘Fast Bag Drop’ desk. Unfortunately, this is now likely to have a queue as long as the old-fashioned check-in queues used to be!

Note: if your credit card has expired or been re-issued since you made the booking, this will delay things (and you’ll need to queue at a ticket desk) – it’s always worth holding on to your old credit card if you can for these situations!

Last edited by Shuttle-Bored; Jun 2, 2008 at 2:31 pm Reason: June 08 Update
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