It’s getting easier and easier to dislike British Airways

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ve finally had enough of British Airways. There are now just too many ways in which the airline annoys, angers, or irritates me, and things just seem to get worse every time the airline issues a statement or makes one of its pronouncements.

Let’s be clear. I don’t dislike the cabin crews, gate agents, lounge agents, phone agents, or flight crews. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had an issue with a frontline British Airways employee in the past decade and I hold most of them in high regard.

My ever-growing dislike of British Airways is reserved for the decision makers at the airline who don’t appear to have any regard or respect for their customers, and there’s plenty of evidence to back up that feeling.

If I rank the annoyances that British Airways inflicts on its customers on a scale of 1 to 4, where level 1 annoyances are mildly annoying and level 4 annoyances send my blood pressure through the roof, this is what things look like:

Level 1 annoyances

The airline often fails to have its aircraft cleaned and there hasn’t been any sign of this improving in the past decade.

It also continues to take an incredibly long time to make any kind of onboard improvements. The Club Suite roll out is still dragging on and may eclipse the United Airlines Polaris roll out as the slowest ever installation of a new cabin product on a major airline.

More embarrassingly, for BA, while its competitors are installing the new Starlink wifi systems on multiple aircraft every night, British Airways took nine weeks to equip just five of its aircraft with the same technology and now seems to have paused the rollout entirely.

Given that a number of British Airways aircraft still don’t have wifi at all, I guess that’s not particularly surprising.

Level 2 annoyances

At level two, things start to get really annoying and this is where we have to address BA’s utterly appalling IT systems which continue to make the airline’s website and app truly horrible to use (if they can be used at all).

• The old BA app was unable to remember that I have bookings – it would happily tell me that it I have none when, unfortunately, I usually had plenty. The new app (released very recently) seems to have been designed by a 3 year old, it pushes users to the BA website at every opportunity and it continues to get even the most basic of information wrong (e.g. it thinks that seats 11C and 11D are both middle seats on BA’s short-haul aircraft when they’re both aisle seats in every single mainline narrowbody aircraft British Airways operates).

• The website (which has had more redesigns than a Hollywood Housewife’s face) will often refuse to allow me to log in and will hang while it has a full-on meltdown. Yes, even the new and still horrendous “nx” site. If it was sentient I’d compare it to an “overtired” toddler.
• Award bookings can become un-cancellable online for no reason at all
• Flight bookings (when actually visible) can appear listed in no discernible order which can give the impression that one or more bookings have disappeared.
• Flight bookings will often show an error message when you attempt to access the underlying information. You have to call in if you want to check if BA has reassigned your seat (more on that later!) or if anything else has changed in the booking.
• Completely pointless emails get sent out to customers.
• The website is often completely inaccessible “due to high demand” (a claim which is patently untrue as I’ve seen this show up in the middle of the night).

The list of IT errors, glitches, and issues goes on and on (if you want more examples, take a look this FlyerTalk thread) and there is absolutely no sign of the airline doing anything about it.

Yes, we kept being told that BA is spending tens of millions on new IT systems, but we’ve been hearing that for years, and yet here we are still facing the same issues that were around in the previous decade.

Level 3 annoyance

At level 3, we have two things that really get my hackles up.

Firstly, the lesser (just about) of the two issues, is the airline’s fondness for telling its customers that any negative changes to the overall offering are purely as a result of their requests.

• Fewer options when you buy food onboard? Customers wanted this.
• Removal of individual bottles of water onboard? Customer demands.
• Breakfast/brunch served onboard until mid-afternoon? As a direct result of customer surveys, apparently.
• Higher redemption costs and higher surcharges? Both down to customer demands (who doesn’t want to pay more when they fly?)
• A revamp of the frequent flyer program which makes it considerably harder and considerably more expensive to earn elite status? A customer driven decision.

If the airline wants to make changes to the way it does things, fair enough. That’s its prerogative. But don’t treat us all like idiots and claim that we’re turkeys voting for Christmas.

Sure, BA is far from being alone in doing this, but “others do it so why shouldn’t we?” has never been a good reason to do anything.

The second annoyance at this level is one that’s particularly close to my heart because I seem to fall foul of this far too often. The issue? Seat swaps.

While British Airways is happy to send out all kinds of emails that add absolutely nothing to the customer experience (I got an email reminding me about an “upcoming trip” the other day and it was for a trip that’s over 8 months away), it continually fails to inform customers when their seats have been changed.

For reasons that remain unclear, British Airways seems to swap around passenger seat allocations more than any other airline that I have ever used, and it often does so for no obvious reason.

One day you’re in 11D (a comfortable exit row aisle seat on a 4+ hour short-haul flight) and the next day you’re in 18D (a middle seat with painfully little legroom).

It’s bad enough when you get kicked out of your short-haul exit row seat with no notice because BA has expanded its Business Class cabin or because there’s been an aircraft swap, but it’s nothing short of infuriating when there’s been no change in aircraft and no change in cabin configuration and yet there you are, thrown into a seat 12 rows further back and with someone else occupying your original seat.

I’ve written about this before so I’ll resist the temptation to go on about this, but if I ever meet the person in charge of making this happen, I won’t be held accountable for my actions. There’s a very special circle of hell reserved just for them.

Level 4 annoyance

I’ve left the “best” until last, and this is something that I find indefensible.

British Airways has taken to being underhand and disingenuous in some of its dealings with its customers, and the airline appears to have taken a conscious decision to act in this way.

In recent times, we’ve seen British Airways slip out the announcement that it was pushing through massive changes to its frequent flyer program just two days before New Year 2024/2025 and at a time when it clearly hoped as few people as possible would be paying attention. That was underhand and clearly deliberate.

We’ve also seen British Airways announce changes to the surcharges that it adds to award bookings while providing examples that didn’t give customers the full picture.

The information the airline gave ahead of the devaluation (five months ago) suggested that the increases in surcharges would be small, but when the devaluation hit, we discovered that some of the surcharges had increased by over 70% (LHR-LCA being a good example of that).

This was disingenuous and clearly deliberate.

A few weeks ago came another British Airways surcharge announcement, and this time the email gave customers just 4 days’ notice and almost no information at all.

I guess that’s better than what we usually get from Virgin Atlantic (the no notice airline), but 4 days’ notice is still very poor.

Nothing says “we respect our customers” like a six-line email telling people that their rewards currency may be being devalued but not telling them anything else. If they want to know how or why, they have to click though to the website.

Oh, and who thought that the line reading “[t]hank you for your continued support and understanding” was a good idea? What kind of idiotic sign off is that?!

Anyone clicking through to the website from the email saw this:

That’s it. That’s all the information BA was giving customers, so couldn’t this have been added to the six lines in the email?

Once again we were only given a very limited number of examples showing what the new surcharges were going to be and, once again, customers weren’t given a before and after comparison.

Fortunately, this time things turned out quite well as the surcharge increases were insignificant, but the messaging from the airline was still terrible.

Bottom line

These isn’t one single thing that British Airways has done (or continues to do) that has left me really disliking it. Instead, it’s the airline’s behavior as a whole and the multiple ways in which it shows little regard for its customers, shows its customers very little respect and, the way it often gaslights them or acts like they’re simpletons that cannot see what’s right in front of them.

I’d love to be able to say “I’m done with this airline and I’m not giving it another penny of my money”, but I can’t, so I’d be lying if I tried to claim that.

There are certain routes that I use on which BA is the only airline that offers a non-stop service and I’m not about to take a circuitous routing just to “get back” at the airline – that would be a great example of an exercise in futility and great example of cutting my nose off to spite my face.

What I’m now doing, however, is using competitor airlines where they offer non-stop services to the destinations I need to get to (Air France to Paris, KLM to Amsterdam, ITA to Milan, Turkish to Istanbul, Aegean to Athens, etc…).

Will this make any difference to British Airways? No, of course it won’t. But I can’t very well call out an airline for being underhand and disingenuous and then continue to use it all the time, can I? What kind of idiot would do something like that?!* 😁

*That’s a rhetorical question. I don’t need any replies!