Pre-Booking A British Airways Meal – My Experience

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A couple of weeks ago Joanna and I flew to Miami with British Airways in the World Traveler (Economy Class) cabin and, because I don’t fly in BA long-haul Economy Class very often and because I write this blog, I wanted to make sure that I tried out as many different facets of BA’s Economy Class service as possible.

One of the options British Airways now offers its Economy Class passengers is the option to pre-pay for a better meal than the one you get as part of your fare so, in the name of research, I decided to order a meal for Joanna.

With prices ranging between £15 and £18 ($18-$22) the pre-order meals aren’t cheap and, as I also wanted to see how the pre-ordered meal compared to whatever British Airways was serving the rest of the cabin, I didn’t order a meal for myself.

Pre-Ordering A British Airways Meal

A little over a week before departure I logged in to my account on BA.com, accessed our reservation via the “Manage My Booking” function.

British Airways makes it pretty easy to find where to pre-order meals as the option is right there under the flight details:

There were quite a few options to choose from and Joanna went for the “healthy choice”:

The next stage of the ordering process was equally simple.

I had to agree to the terms & conditions….

…then input my credit card details and wait for the website to work its magic.

I’ve got to hand it to British Airways, they’ve made it very easy to part with your money. The process is very straight forward….or at least it should be unless you see this screen:

Hmmm…

I wasn’t sure what had happened as my Amex had been charged for the meal…..

…but clearly something had gone wrong.

I’ve had to contact “my local British Airways office” a few times in the past and it has been neither “local” nor a short phone call so I really didn’t want to have to do that again.

I decided to have another try online.

I really should have known better. This is, after all, the same website that regularly tells me that I have no bookings when I usually have at least four and that likes to give me this error message on a near-daily basis:

In hindsight it’s no surprise that the same thing happened all over again – my credit card got charged and I got the error message again.

Ok, it was time to be brave and to call British Airways.

After a 20 minute hold (which isn’t too bad compared to some of my previous experiences) I got a friendly call-centre agent who used my booking reference to look up the reservation.

She could see that I had been changed twice so she immediately reversed one of the charges….

…and set about ordering the healthy choice meal for Joanna.

She seemed to be having some issues so she put me on hold for a few minutes but, when she came back on the line, she announced that all was in order and that the Healthy Choice meal had been reserved.

I was in front of my computer at the time so I asked if I should be able to see the meal in Joanna’s reservation. The agent confirmed that yes, I should be able to see it….but it wasn’t there.

She said that this has happened in the past and that it was “probably a web error” and that “it may appear at a later date” but that I shouldn’t worry as the meal was definitely logged in the reservation.

Ok……

I didn’t have much confidence in what the agent had just said but I didn’t really have much choice but to wait and see if the meal appeared in the reservation before we departed.

The day before we were due to fly out the meal still wasn’t in the reservation so I called up BA again – never before have I gone to so much effort to order a airline meal!

A different agent took a look at the booking and confirmed that the Healthy Choice meal was definitely associated with Joanna’s reservation.

Ok. I still couldn’t see the meal online but I had no choice but to believe what two BA agents had now told me.

No doubt all of you can already see where this is going but I’ll finish the story anyway….

Sure enough, come meal time onboard our flight, the flight attendant came around and offered Joanna a choice of the two regular meals.

I pointed out that we had pre-paid for a “healthy meal” (I got the name a little wrong) and, very quickly and very snippily, the FA replied that they don’t offer any such meal.

I politely explained the situation and he still refused to accept that the airline even offered such an option…until I showed him the screenshot of all the pre-paid meals that I’ve inserted further up this blog post.

At that point the FA’s demeanour went from snippy/haughty to polite and apologetic.

It turned out that British Airways had not loaded a pre-paid meal for Joanna because, as the FA showed me on his iPad, there was nothing in her reservation showing that she had pre-paid for one.

Bottom Line

In the grand scheme of things this wasn’t a major disaster – Joanna got a regular meal (which wasn’t too bad) and no one died – but that’s not the point.

The point here is that you clearly can’t trust the British Airways website to process your meal orders correctly and you can’t trust the British Airways call centre to do it either.

I don’t think the call center staff lied to me – that would require a high degree of collusion that’s almost beyond the realm of possibility – but I do think that they’re either incompetent or there are some serious failings in BA’s systems.

In this instance this was just an annoyance and no more as Joanna had no specific dietary needs….but what if this had been someone else? What if this was  someone who needed a Diabetic meal or a gluten intolerant meal? Could the same thing happen then?

The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t take call-center staff at their word. If something is meant to show online and it doesn’t then it’s not just a “web error” but a failing somewhere in the system.

If you’re meant to see something you’ve ordered online and you can’t then the chances are that whoever else needs to see it to fulfil the order probably can’t see it either. Lesson learned.