BA RESERVATION SYSTEM VERSUS REAL BA STAFF

We attempted to check in for our flight this afternoon from Gatwick to Tirana. There was no open desk at First and only one for Club Europe, but the floating BA rep quickly directed us to a free economy desk. It seemed that a change in the return date had never been properly processed and charged to my Visa. The guy at ticketing was extremely good – explaining, phoning and checking – and I finally got an answer that I still owed them a £35 admin fee (on two Club Europe return tickets) for the booking change.

After a couple of swipes, the guy gave me my card back and said: “Mr Smith, they are now saying that I cannot process your Visa card because of an internal system error. I am therefore overriding the system and confirming your booking, with no admin fee. If our reservations department cannot even do simple things properly, why should you have to go through this process?” The whole effort added about 40 minutes to our check-in procedure but full credit to the desk officer. A lot of BA’s customer-facing staff are outstanding, as this shows. They are let down by shoddy IT systems and support, badly designed by “programmers” who have inadequate knowledge of the realities of what the customerfacing staff are exposed to in the course of their duties. Changing everything to “point and click” idiot boxes is a disaster. I agree. Computer systems, generally, don’t have common sense. It’s lovely to hear stories like this – inconvenient and annoying at the time, of course, and avoidable (since clearly you should have been charged a while before) – but how nice to know that sometimes, when things go wrong, a staff member takes time to put things right.