A ba.com bug that Gold card holders should know about

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• riku says:

  18 Mar18 March 05:48

  Surely if you want to book three seats you will eventually have to type “3” into the number of seats field because otherwise you would only book one seat when you need three. This “bug” seems only to affect people who who search for one seat in an attempt to get booking class availability numbers. A subscription to expertflyer would be worthwhile since it gives the numbers directly without need for this kind of single seat search shenanigans.

  • david says:

    18 Mar18 March 06:17

    @Riku I think you missed the point of the article.

  • R01 says:

    18 Mar18 March 06:57

    I think you need to read the article again

• Stuart says:

  18 Mar18 March 05:50

  Not a good card bug, but sadly I’m one of them 3 person family’s who are a little bit stuck with the Amex 2-4-1 rules. I searched for Avios flights for the 3 of us to Dubai for next Feb half term when they were released using a 2-4-1. Lots of availability showed. When I tried to pick the day time Dubai flights I got an error basically saying I had to add another person and another 2-4-1 to get the flights due to the increased availability using a 2-4-1. My only work around was to search without using the 2-4-1 and see what was standard availability there was and then go back knowing these flights and picking them ones using the 2-4-1. They really shouldn’t be showing the flights as ‘available’ if I can’t book them.

• daveinitalia says:

  18 Mar18 March 06:09

  As a software developer I’d like to point out that this isn’t a bug, it’s working as intended. That’s not to say ba.com doesn’t have any bugs, it’s full of them but this isn’t one.

  At best you can describe it as a feature that’s open to improvement. Let’s think about how revenue tickets work for a moment. Revenue tickets are sold based on fare codes and if you search for one person it will show the price based on the cheapest fare bucket with at least one seat available – it might then say “only X seats available at this price”, if X is less than the number of people who you want to book for then by this search you don’t know whether the next fare band up will happen to have all the availability you need. But if you search for the actual number of seats you need it’ll only show you the cheapest buckets that’ll fulfil the total number of passengers, it won’t hint of availability of the cheaper buckets should you choose to split your booking up.

  So when doing a reward search for one person, if there’s a seat for 1 in X class it will show it because there’s no need for the booking to use the V class. The web site is doing what you asked and like with revenue bookings it just shows the number of seats left in this fare bucket.

  A .bug is when software doesn’t behave as designed, I’m sure in this case it is working as designed. It’s quite possible the person who wrote the spec for this feature never even thought about this use case.

  The article was still useful for pointing out the issue – but it’s important to note that these ‘only X seats available’ messages only reflect availability at the exact moment and sometimes additional availability opens up or on more popular routes someone swoops in and grabs the availability while you’re still hesitating.

  • Chris says:

    18 Mar18 March 06:40

    Also as a developer/product owner, that’s a fair point but it’s also possible (and best practice, it might be argued) to offer logical warnings/info boxes if you’re aware of the scenario, for clarity wherever there’s ambiguity. (Not that it’s done often! You’re right that many, many logical processes are invisible to most and generally not explained or clarified!)

    But Rob, if you’re going to start covering bugs on the BA site, you might have to hire even more staff!

  • Iain says:

    18 Mar18 March 06:59

    A measured, informative and helpful response.

    • Metty says:

      18 Mar18 March 07:16

      +1, there’ll doubtless be someone out there who didn’t realise that if booking for a group you can often save ££ by booking one or two at a time due to the fare buckets

      • Richie says:

        18 Mar18 March 08:10

        But don’t ignore that if the flight is cancelled, passengers on separate bookings may be re-routed separately.

        • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

          18 Mar18 March 08:38

          But whether it’s on their own metal or onto another carrier rebooking 8 together on the same booking isn’t going to be a piece of cake and i you want to get to where you need to get to splitting up the party may be the best and quickest thing to do.

  • blue_wolf says:

    18 Mar18 March 07:10

    “It’s a feature, not a bug” 😉

  • Sun7 says:

    18 Mar18 March 19:50

    A ba.com feature available to Gold members that can be unlocked with exact number of seats searched. When this article is rerun in future hopefully the reasoning provided by many like Dave is considered. This article had lot of dissonance with the IT person in me

  • Alan says:

    6 Apr6 April 08:13

    Very well reasoned response. BA website and mobile apps have a positive cornucopia of bugs but I wouldn’t class this as one of them. If you want a chuckle have a read at some of the app store reviews of the BA app (either platform), some are pretty well written and almost all are one star!

• Mh says:

  18 Mar18 March 06:20

  The amount of bugs, errors and quirks on ba.com is outrageous.
  It is a lottery whether you can complete a booking cycle without errors. Combine the .com with the terrible ba app, the mixing of old and new sites, the fact that the experience has been awful for at least 2 years!, and it’s a surprise more IT heads have not rolled or the share price has not punished ba.

• Rui N. says:

  18 Mar18 March 06:54

  Where is the bug supposed to be? When you search for the correct number of seats, correct availability shows.

  • CJD says:

    18 Mar18 March 07:32

    The ‘bug’ is Rob’s way of searching. Looks to me like the website is working fine based on what he’s searching for.

    • Rui N. says:

      18 Mar18 March 08:26

      Exactly. It shows the availability needed for the number of people that the search is for. There is no bug.

• Paul says:

  18 Mar18 March 08:12

  The use of the word bug when talking about any aspect of BAs IT does not do justice to the skip fire that the entire BA IT environment is.
  Some people cannot access their accounts, others cannot book Avios. Many staff cannot book hotlines ( and are directed to the public site) some cannot checkin. It goes on and on.
  The proble is that BA are trying to operate a 21st century business with a 20th century system. Rather than buy an off the shelf system, they have bought some things, developed others in house and then tried to make them work together.
  They (and in turn their customers) are reaping the rewards of decades of costs cutting and tinkering.
  Their focus is alledgedly on an entirely new system and do resources to fix the mess are limited.
  It’s not going to get better soon, indeed it could get much worse.

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    18 Mar18 March 08:59

    Both Air Canada and Virgin America bought new, off the shelf systems and it was a disaster for them both and took ages for it to be fully functional. Actual bookings were lost from the system and it was impossible to make new bookings for periods.

    The complexity of airline systems like BAs isn’t just down to BA. Becaue of things loyalty schemes and bag interlining and multi airline tickets that requires airlines A system to message Airline Bs and so on. A system to enable passengers on a cancelled flight to be easuly rebooked onto othe carriers and so on. Not every fault is down to BA.

    One of the reason the likes of Easyjet and Ryanair don’t have major IT issues is because they don’t have a complicated loyalty scheme, don’t sell multi airline flights and don’t interline to or from other carriers and that reduces the complexity of the IT.

    • Paul says:

      18 Mar18 March 11:31

      Air Canada’s problem were almost entirely in-house generated as they did not train staff and the staff were very anti change. It also happened in the days leading up to next lock down.
      Hawaiian, Southwest, Etihad, ITA, Vietnam Airlines and many others have all bought the same systems with almost no one noticing. Its about management will and proper training.

    • PH says:

      18 Mar18 March 23:07

      Yes but compare BA’s customer facing website and app experience to United or Delta…night day

• chris w says:

  18 Mar18 March 08:20

  This is the biggest IT bug you think BA has? Not the apps inability to show boarding passes, or the website not showing the upcoming flights??

  • M says:

    20 Mar20 March 15:59

    And it keeps on getting worse! I am surprised there is no more outrage about the amount of bugs at every step of the digital experience. The app on Android is completely unusable!

• Andy says:

  18 Mar18 March 08:25

  Very helpful article, thank you. I was searching last night, and having just reached gold saw I was getting the extra availability note- but didn’t know the logic. And I search the same way as Rob!

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