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There are quite a few things that British Airways isn’t particularly good at doing, but by far and away the most obvious of the airline’s failings is its inability to operate an IT system.
To say that BA’s IT infrastructure is appalling would be a huge understatement (saying that there are “a few” stars in the universe would be less of an understatement), and while we keep being promised improvements every time the airline wants to persuade customers that management’s sole purpose in life isn’t to cut costs wherever possible, the fact remains that the airline’s IT systems are as dire as ever (1,000+ comments in the past 8 months on this FlyerTalk thread will give you some idea of the scope of the issues).
Over the past few years, customers have had to, among a whole host of other issues, get used to the BA website not allowing them to log in, not displaying flights correctly (sometimes not at all), not allowing them to make award bookings, not allowing them to check-in when check-in is clearly open, and even getting basic things wrong like telling them that a “D seat” in a 6-seat row is a middle seat when it’s clearly an aisle seat.
Now, a new IT issue seems to have appeared – some award flights cannot be canceled online.
This first came to my attention yesterday when I had an award flight that I needed to cancel and I noticed that, in the “Manage My Booking” section of the BA website, there was a message suggesting that I wasn’t logged in and so couldn’t change the date or time of my flight.
I was very definitely logged in, and when I clicked on “cancel booking” an error message asking me to “sign into the British Airways account used to make this booking” appeared.
For a very brief moment I thought that I may have unwittingly made this booking through Joanna’s account and that this was causing an issue, so I logged in to her account, pulled up the reservation, and got the same error when trying to cancel (so that wasn’t the problem).
Not having the time (or the patience) to put up with any more nonsense from the British Airways website, I called customer services (where the automated part of the service asked me to input my member number twice in the space of 30 seconds – another IT masterpiece from BA), and quickly found out (from the agent) that I wasn’t the only one with this issue.
He had already spoken to three other customers that day who all had the same issue and the phone lines had only been open for a little over 90 minutes.
The very helpful agent couldn’t explain why I wasn’t able to cancel online, so he dealt with the cancellation on my behalf (the call took just over 6 minutes from start to finish) and that was the end of that, but the agent’s friendly helpfulness doesn’t make up for yet another British Airways IT debacle.
I was lucky. Because I still have BA Gold status, any call I make to customer services usually gets answered pretty quickly (I think I was on hold for under a minute on this call), but what about customers without elite status who find that they can’t cancel a booking online?
This group of people could find themselves having to stay on the phone for a lot longer (30, 40, 50 minutes?) before they can have someone deal with a request that should be actionable through the British Airways website in just a few clicks.
This is nonsense, and it’s something that British Airways should be embarrassed to have to admit is an issue, but the airline doesn’t seem to care.
None of the airline’s IT systems ever seem to improve and all BA’s management seems capable of doing is trotting out the same tired old line every few months “we’re spending £750m on IT infrastructure as part of our £7bn transformation plan”.
Where is this money being spent?!
Sure, we’ve seen a new website interface appear (which is buggy as hell) and changes have been made to the app (which is also buggy as hell), but there’s very little evidence of any other changes, and there’s definitely no evidence to show that the airline’s long-suffering customers will soon see an end to all of these IT issues.
Still, I guess it could be worse, the airline could have just moved its frequent flyer program over to a revenue-based model and it could have started to ask customers to spend well in excess of £20,000 (~$27,000) in exchange for top-tier status with no new benefits or improvements … oh, wait …!!!
