Reply To: Cabin upgrade voucher

[JDB]

@Froggee – I love a well written tale with a happy ending hopefully soon to land in your inbox.

In the olden days BA telephone staff (and in the Travel Shops – monster Air Miles bonuses for using those!) were incredibly well trained, knowledgeable and helpful plus ticketing trained even if they didn’t usually issue tickets. They had wide discretion to assist (particularly status) passengers in remarkable ways that ultimately management probably thought excessive, so they took discretion away to almost zero. That made the job harder and more boring so most of the experienced staff have left.

Now they seem to find completely clueless nincompoops who either aren’t trained or are incapable of being trained. They sound so unmotivated and one can hear that they don’t have a clue what you are talking about. Often totally distracted WFH to add to the skills on their CV.

They don’t know their own rules or how to use their own systems and, as you experienced, anything using a voucher is manual and thus beyond many of their capabilities.

They have so few ticketing people (and even fewer experienced or sensible ones) that they can’t manage the ticketing queues fast enough before PCI-DSS compliance kicks in to delete full payment details sending the passenger round the circuit again.