This one made me angry and laugh at the same time.

The usual situation with rebooking (i.e. for 95% of my rebookings): booked "Semi-Flex Business" fare in CE. Fare difference has to be paid in case of rebooking, but no change fee. Rebooking on the website does not work, either because (i) "this ticket cannot be changed" (ii) "an error has occured, please try again" (iii) a fare difference is indicated, but when you then move to the payment page the amount to be paid is much higher.

Today it was (iii): had a fare difference indication of �96, on the final payments page it was �150. Called them. The usual waste of time (several minutes wait, all kinds of identification where everything had to be repeated twice because the person didn't understand or was too slow), and then we get to it. She tells me "it's 150". I explain that must be wrong, as per their own website it was 96. She answers the usual "fares are dynamic". I invite her to check my booking for herself on ba.com, and she says "it is 121". I guess the dynamic bit kicked in and 96 went up to 121. So I wanted to take the 121. "OK, so the amount to pay is 175".

What followed was the kind of discussion where you just despair because the other side is a mix of unwilling or unable to grasp, and maybe some bad will. "Can you explain why there is a difference going from the fare selection to the final payment? It isn't change fee, nor phone fee, nor credit card fee. So maybe an error" - "That's the fare I am showing" - "Can you send it to the ticketing team so that they can check?" - "No, we only send it to the ticketing team when there is a technical problem. I will not send it to the ticketing team" - "But there is a problem, your website shows a different fare, so one of them is wrong" - "No, there isn't a technical error. Our systems never have issues". Err.... dysfuncitonal website, different fares depending on whether you at the same moment in time check website vs. phone agent vs. ticketing team, sending out status extensions to thousands of customers...

BA having a totally dysfunctional IT system is one thing, and it's bad enough. The time it takes to change a booking which with other airlines takes less than a minute on the web or less than 2 minutes on the phone is a major nuisance. But then having call centre agents unwilling to help and refusing to recognise that their systems often do have issues is just making it worse.

How is it BA can knowingly underinvest in IT knowing we will waste our lives on the phone to resolve it?

I feel like we need to introduce a time/cost penalty back to BA for this nonsense... screenshot it, buy a new one-way ticket, send in to Contact Us form asking for a refund of the difference, click button to dispute charge on credit card after 14 days? They would soon learn...

Those are the type of calls where I really need to bite my tongue... not just with BA - and they happen too often. Did you get it resolved with that agent or with ticketing in the end?

When agents are understanding, have the required humour to make light of these mostly well known issues, they can be a pleasure to interact with. When they are useless, poor communicators or in some rare cases even aggressive, you just hang up. This must inevitably lose the airline revenue. Unfortunately, it will never show up in the Excel sheet shown to the CFO. Neither will the loss of goodwill caused by this terrible state of affairs.

That's an immediate HUACA situation for me.

Any phone agent that is so blind as to think BAs IT is flawless is also likely to be so incompetent that they would do more harm than good with any booking I wanted to make/change.

HUACA, and log a complaint afterwards (include date/time of call and agent's name if known).

I'd be tempted to take rugby23's advice - take screenshot of the �96, then charge-back the difference after being charged �150. And log a complaint.

How incredibly frustrating for the OP. It�s one thing for agents to make a genuine mistake (and we all have bad days), but you do wonder whether someone with this mindset and blinkered approach should be allowed any direct contact with customers.

That quote in the thread title took me back over twenty years to the surreal press conferences held by Iraq�s Minister for Information.
The BA phone agent�s truly bizarre line of defence - �Our systems never have issues� - has to be right up there with the many infamous claims made by the Minister, who soon came to be widely known as Comical Ali.

With a semi flex fare, are they not an online only fare and so not likely to be available when making a change with an agent - 121 online may not be available offline?

This reminds me of a recent call I had. We were in Dubrovnik. Our flight back to London, having failed to land because of wind, diverted to Bari and was clearly, like the previous attempted arrival, going to be sent back to London. We had been sent back through immigration, and there was a very long queue for buses. I called the gold line to see about some re-booking options. We were told, with what I imagine was an absolutely straight face, that the BA Flight Tracker, which at that moment still showed the flight as departing in about 15 minutes from the time of the call, and when the plane was (I forget) either over the Adriatic in the direction of Bari or on its way back to London, was absolutely correct, as the BA Operations Department 'updated it in real time'. I gave up.

"never have issues"

I've got the receipts! The catalog of failures is utterly ludicrous but as pointed out above, it's not something you can point to in load factors.

I had a chat with an agent a week or so ago when I was trying to move the date of an Avios booking (I've never managed to change the date or time of an Avios booking online, but that's an aside).

She said that they (as humans) are being trained to use the same the repsonses as the AI/automated bots, the rationale being that it gives a consistent customer interraction.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

And people claim AI is the one that has a ‘hallucination’ problem…

Yes and no...

1) The semi-flex J fare can only be bought online, that is true. However, the issue I had - the fare selection screen showing one price, then the payment screen showing a higher price - happened all in the online channel. Clearly there is a problem.
2) She did chcek on the website and saw that there was "something happening" between the fare selection and payments page. But shrug shoulders and said "there must be a technical error" (so there is!) but that the price that she had, which was different, was right "because our systems never have issues"
3) So, when there is an error on the webpage, I would expect the call centre to fix that error in the customer's interest, especially since they can reproduce the fare that I am seeing. That should be irrespective of whether the original fare can only be bought online or not.

In the past that sort of somehow always worked - with lots of pain, sometimes 3-4 phone calls, having to wait for 48 hours, having to pay something that was inbetween the web fare and whatever they came up with (they called back with calls like "I have a better offer for you" - as if this was a negotiation).... but never did anyone flat out refuse to get the ticketing team working on it and try to either fix the fare, or give an explanation of what was going on between fare selection and payment screen. Maybe there is something "legitimate", but this lady just woulnd't care and just told me "that's the way it is", despite seeing in front of her own eyes that there was a problem.

I had a similar story. Last flight of the evening to somewhere I don't remember was cancelled after pushback at LHR, because the airport was closed at that time. I literally spent 90 minutes on the phone with some Gold guy who explained to me that I was flying, then that I need to go and see someone in departures hall at LHR (which was empty except for some emergency counter that time of night) to take me off the flight although the flight had been cancelled, and by the time all of that was done the last seat on the frist flight next morning was taken. Add to that the usual time wasters such as giving the reference number four times, debating that you want to fly on another airline, etc.

If that is the case, that is the wrong approach.

It is one thing to have such a totally shi???y IT system as BA. But I understand that it takes time (which.they can't change) and money (that they could change by devoting more to IT) to get systems up to 21st century standards.

It is a totally different thing to then have people on the phone telling you that there isn't a problem and who are unwilling to help. They should train their people to recognise that their IT is rubbish, and to help customers, who are annoyed already that they have to spend lots of time on the phone and certainly don't want to be taken for idiots on top of that by someone who tells them there is no problem.

Several people suggested I should just pay the higher fare, and then reclaim the difference? Will that work? Given how on the phone they don't acknowledge that there is an issue I don't trust that they will when I send in my claim.

Credit card chargeback really isn't an option. The Credit Card Company will probably not do it, this is a "legitimate" transaction, the debit is of the amount that I have authorised. It may not be "right" between me and BA, but BA hasn't tricked the CC company. This isn't credit card fraud.

"Dynamic" isn't a word I'd readily associate with BA IT.