British Airways to trial ‘automatic check-in’ at Heathrow and Gatwick

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• Nick says:

  2 Oct2 October 07:19

  As long as all PAX are allocated seats at the rear of the plane when opting in it shouldn’t be a problem. But that might not happen as pax have to be spread over the entire aircraft for weight spread. Auto seat allocation won’t use up exit seats so it won’t bother me.

• Larryflyer says:

  2 Oct2 October 08:57

  As a SCH, I tend to choose my preferred seat at booking, then check again at T-72 in case anything significant has changed (e.g. position of curtain on shorthaul flight). I usually do OLCI, but ALWAYS delay printing my boarding pass as late as possible ( i.e at the airport) to preserve the option of changing my seat until after most other passengers have been allocated seats. This way, I can move to a seat that has a higher chance of being next to an empty seat. The proposed automatic checkin (for others, not me!) sounds like it will give me a more complete view early on of the final seat allocations.

• Colin A-B says:

  2 Oct2 October 09:14

  This reminds me that automatic bag-drop is being trialled at LGW when I went through the week before last.
  The concept was simple enough but it was remarkably slow.

• LHR Tim says:

  2 Oct2 October 11:39

  Air France do this and it is dreadful. You get allocated a seat but you can change it. However if you arez on a cheap fare, it gives you the option of re-picking your seat — somewhere in the back of the bus.

  BA could always use the SAS algorithm – Allocate seating based on status, so Star Alliance Golds first before Silver. Then start allocating seats – from the *rear* of the aircraft.

  Suppose after many folks catch on that this is bad, they’ll opt to buy seats together when they first make the booking. So maybe it is very clever after all — from a revenue generating perspective
  .

• GUWonder says:

  2 Oct2 October 11:55

  Sounds like eventually this may end up married with selling more people on paying to pick seats.

  Airlines tend to be motivated more by money than by concerns for passenger convenience.

• John says:

  2 Oct2 October 12:19

  I’ve never really understood the concept of needing to check in. I mean you can check-in and then still not show, so why the need to have an extra step? For non-flexible tickets, the only options are to take the flight or not take it, so why not just automatically check in once booked? If they want to call it auto-seat selection, then they should just call it that, but I guess this is not surprising from BA…

  I remember when I was a small child that my parents had to call up 2 days before a flight to confirm that we were going to take it… and then still need to check in at -3 hours.

  • Rob says:

    2 Oct2 October 13:03

    I remember, in Bangkok I think, being kicked off a flight because I had not reconfirmed it. This would have been 1990-ish. I had actually given my ticket to the hotel concierge to do it for me, and the tickets were returned to me the same day with a big tick on them, implying all was done.

    I can’t remember how it worked out. I think I got bumped onto a flight the following day and I made the hotel give me another nights accommodation on the house.

• Speedbird_abz says:

  2 Oct2 October 12:21

  I have no status on Alitalia and got allocated 14B and my partner 36B the other day at check-in despite being numbers 119 and 120 to check-in online about 23 hours prior to the flight. I then had to pay 20 euros each to sit together at an emergency exit – there were no other seats together. The BA ‘trial’ will lead to more people paying for allocated seating and unhappy customers being seated behind each other etc, as has been stated above. Luckily I can choose my BA seats in advance, but if not I think I would not take the chance and pay up – especially on a long-haul.

• Lady London says:

  2 Oct2 October 13:47

  I seem to remember airlines like Swiss have been doing this and self-bag-drop for many years. It doesn’t add anything positive to the experience of the unstatused passenger and may well mean the passenger now has to take extra action to undo whatever has been done automatically when they might have had a better chance without the automatic system, of getting a particular location of seat if this was something that mattered to them.

  As other posters have said, this looks like a fiendish way for BA to reduce the ability of passengers to secure seats they would prefer without paying extra and spending time to take action to avoid the now higher chance of getting stuck with rotten seats. It has nothing to do with passenger convenience quite the opposite and no doubt to remove passenger choice forcing payment by the passenger to get what they had a reasonable possibility of achieving without extra payment before.

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