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Made an alteration to a booking and was told tickets would be reissued within seven days.
Have subsequently called four times in the past six weeks, each time having to punch in the card security number and each time being told the case was being escalated.
Still no reissue of tickets.
What on earth is going on and how does one escalate what is a shambolic situation?
True, I don’t travel until September but does this mean it is futile calling for a ticket reissue until days before the flight, with seemingly no guarantee they’ll issue?
It’s not a shambolic situation,
Reticketing is done in flight date order not date someone asks / needs it.
If cancellation etc happen to flights due to depart before yours they will go into the queue ahead of yours.
it is shambolic in the sense that I’ve spent a total of around four hours on the phone and been PROMISED tickets would be reissued as a priority.
If what you’re saying is true, then there’s a huge disconnect between the ticketing team and what customer-facing agents are quoting.
Why, for example, do they ask you each time to punch in the security code when they themselves say it expires within a finite period? It’s just wasting everybody’s time.
So, yes, I would suggest it’s shambolic – it’s a joke.
That’s because most of the time it does happen within 7 days and sooner so that’s what they tell you.
That’s because most of the time it does happen within 7 days and sooner so that’s what they tell you.
So in this case, what would you advise I do? Nothing until a week before the flight?
@rooster – I don’t think anyone was suggesting waiting until seven days before but spending four hours calling to try and jump the queue when travel is two to three months away was never going to help. All it’s done is to make you annoyed, wasted your time and BA’s time as well as clogging up the lines for more pressing calls.
They have a system. It may not be a good one but it sort of works and you aren’t prejudiced in any way by not having a ticket issued at this stage. It’s not like a refund where you are waiting on money back or need Avios/voucher back to make another booking.
@rooster – I don’t think anyone was suggesting waiting until seven days before but spending four hours calling to try and jump the queue when travel is two to three months away was never going to help. All it’s done is to make you annoyed, wasted your time and BA’s time as well as clogging up the lines for more pressing calls.
They have a system. It may not be a good one but it sort of works and you aren’t prejudiced in any way by not having a ticket issued at this stage. It’s not like a refund where you are waiting on money back or need Avios/voucher back to make another booking.
The issue I have is, none of what you’re saying has been made clear to me on any of my calls; instead, there is a profuse apology, and an increasingly escalatory tone amid promises to sort ASAP – which then doesn’t happen. At no point have they said there’s no need to bother them this far out and it’s better to sort closer to travel.
Rooster, I very much sympathise with you. Waiting 6 weeks when you were informed it would be 7 days. Seems other posters who might have some inside information on how these things work (BA staff?) are lacking empathy, accusing you of clogging up the call centre and jumping the queue when nothing you said suggests that.
A colleague of mine called BA this morning and got cut off 3 times. Shambolic standards indeed.
Indeed.
The 4th time I called, the call agent seemed almost tearful that it hadn’t been sorted. She promised she’d call me back the following day with an update, escalated to her supervisor etc – nothing.
In none of the calls I’ve had has it remotely been suggested it’s futile to be calling ahead of the travel date/time wasting/queue jumping etc.Try Flyertalk and PM BA Refund Helper on there with your booking information.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/ba-refund-helper.htmlBA Systems keep the CVV number for a maximum of 7 days, after which processing will fail and you will need to call in and enter again. Reissuance should last this long even for future travel that are months away.
Hopefully you will get it sorted; more fundamentally there is a structural problem within many organisations that have large call centres, that is one of ownership. In a similar vein, I switched from Octopus to Eon Next for electricity recently and it has been shambolic. Contact with customer service has resulted in different agents telling me things which are the polar opposite to each other. Asking for a bill and to be promised one that never appears, making a formal complaint and the complaints handler never replying. It took a scathing review on TrustPilot for someone at Eon to take ownership of the issues and start to fix them. I switched 10 weeks ago and there are still problems with billing but at least they are being slowly resolved.
Try Flyertalk and PM BA Refund Helper on there with your booking information.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/ba-refund-helper.htmlBA Systems keep the CVV number for a maximum of 7 days, after which processing will fail and you will need to call in and enter again. Reissuance should last this long even for future travel that are months away.
Thanks!
We had this problem too. It turned out the original agent put in the wrong tax code which meant it would never get ticketed. The first 3 Indian based agents failed to spot it. The 4th UK based one did but it still took a week to resolve it. At least he took ownership. My only advice is keep hassling them and make sure you use a UK based agent, ring until you get one.
I now assume that nobody cares in any call centre, that they will routinely overpromise and underdeliver, that its not worth getting upset, just stay calm , be friendly to whichever minimum wage agent picks up and ever so slowly you get there.
Its transformed what was my ever increasing frustration at chatbots and overseas contact teams. And has made me happier too.
Remember nobody actually cares about your problem irrespective of what they say. Dont say please to a chatbot either…
Dont say please to a chatbot either
I wouldn’t get in to the habit of being rude to machines, they’ll start getting revenge on people who do that.
In a similar vein, I switched from Octopus to Eon Next for electricity recently and it has been shambolic. Contact with customer service has resulted in different agents telling me things which are the polar opposite to each other. Asking for a bill and to be promised one that never appears, making a formal complaint and the complaints handler never replying. It took a scathing review on TrustPilot for someone at Eon to take ownership of the issues and start to fix them. I switched 10 weeks ago and there are still problems with billing but at least they are being slowly resolved.
Dismayed but unsurprised to read this as I’m contemplating the same switch.
Octopus also completely unable to sort out an issue. Everyone is very, very nice – and I am nothing but same – but they can’t actually FIX it.
Ombudsman fee should escalate with increasing number of complaints…
For most people, resolution-based customer service is just a classic hygiene factor; it only needs to be good enough. Worse, it only needs to be good enough most of the time. The number of people who are happy to get a few Avios for shocking Barclays service demonstrates this.
As somebody who works in customer service, I do value it and I am often happy to pay for it. I don’t use a cheapo ISP and I forego perks in my current account because I just want it to work.
To get great service, you need to give people agency and discretion. Before Amazon screwed up their customer service, they gave all their agents $50 discretion to resolve problems. Apple for the most part still give their customer-facing staff freedom to just fix problems and have people leave happy.
But this all costs money. In a race to the bottom, you get RyanAir.
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