Flight wasn’t ticketed

[meta]

Confirmation email has the following lines at the top.

“This is your e-ticket receipt. Your ticket is held in our systems, you will not receive a paper ticket for your booking.”

[TGLoyalty]

Exactly and what makes anyone look at this email and think nope I need to triple check my flight is actually ticketed.

[ZoeB]

We travelled from LHR to VLC with my step daughter and her children this April. She had added the baby to their redemption booking a few months before we departed. She was unable to check in at 24 hours before but was reassured on the phone by BA, that everything was fine you will be checked in at the airport.
Its lucky we arrived at the airport early as it took the check in agent almost 1.5 hours to sort out the (not ticketed) mess on the phone.This was time we had planned to spend in the Qantas lounge, not trying to keep a 4 month and 20 month old happy in the checkin area of T3.

[JDB]

TGLoyalty wrote:

Exactly and what makes anyone look at this email and think nope I need to triple check my flight is actually ticketed.

Well, @TGLoyalty when I started travelling, there were paper tickets and the fact that they have now gone electronic doesn’t change the requirement to have a ticket to travel and MMB, receipts etc. don’t enable you to check in, so I check, as I would for any other form of transport or ticketed event. I refer back to the analogy of driving a car with parking sensors and other aids, great progress in car technology as e-tickets are for air travel, but it doesn’t obviate the need, when driving, to use your eyes as well as far as I’m concerned.

When one reads here of people spending lots of time agonising over their seat choice, what food will be served onboard, which lounge to visit, what brand of champagne the lounge has etc. it seems amazing they can’t make the effort to check they have a ticket to travel when an e-ticket is a valuable negotiable instrument in a way a receipt etc. quite obviously is not. You are free to make random assumptions about what email or app MMB constitutes a ‘ticket’ that will allow check-in or you can end up like the unfortunate @ZoeB above and others who have reported here finding themselves in similar situations. I hope that this endless thread might now encourage people to check before they get to the airport.

I’m not sure why this is quite so controversial! The idea of sitting back, not checking and then griping about BA or seeking compensation after the event seems daft, but there we are.

BA, other airlines and many organisations make mistakes all the time (particularly, but not exclusively when bookings are changed) and if the passenger/customer isn’t willing to look after their own affairs and check their individual arrangements, that’s their problem.

[TGLoyalty]

Sometimes you just have to sit back and take in your own anti consumer biased posting and think am I really looking at this the right way.

In the example @ZoeB contacted BA and even their CS didn’t know there was an issue. So even when as a paying customer you try to contact the airline you get poor advice. 99% of people have no idea to look for a 125- ticket number and no where in BA’s email does it suggest you should even check for one.

The point stands it’s absolutely the airlines responsibility to issue the ticket and the email says here’s your e-ticket for all consumers this would constitute a completed contract for the purchase of a flight. Everything after this is BA responsibility and so would any of the financial impact of not issuing the ticket correctly. It’s as simple as that.

You’re basically victim blaming because the consumer is a victim of BA poor processes and inability to correctly issue a ticket.

Also not being funny but there is a whole generation of people that never saw a paper ticket so talking about the olden days is a moot point. I’ve never bought anything but an e-ticket in my life.

[JDB]

@TGLoyalty – I have previously said this may be a generational thing and I travelled alone from the age of 13 so passport, tickets, money was drummed into me from an early age. It’s such a minimal effort to save a lot of potential aggro.

The idea that I am “anti-consumer biased” is really rather offensive given the amount of time I devote to helping people resolve airline and other consumer issues with detailed tailored responses rather than some generalised blah blah blah or reference to another general thread often having misread the OP.

What I also do is to try and bring some perspective and balance vs posters who systematically support the consumer completely irrespective of the facts. That helps nobody.

If you understand the corporate perspective it will also often help you better formulate your case against an organisation. I’m afraid we do also read posts here where the customer is clearly in the wrong and a few people agree but others unthinkingly send them off to ADR/MCOL with an un-winnable case. That’s not helpful either.

I have also clearly stated that I don’t endorse BA’s failure to ticket or correctly ticket bookings but I take the simple view that everyone makes mistakes, BA won’t change this anytime soon so I will take my own precautions.

I also really, really don’t care about who is to blame as this is entirely irrelevant to ensuring a smooth journey.

Frankly, why would anyone rely on BA or any person or organisation to get it right every time or assume they will? Maybe 99% of BA bookings get ticketed correctly?? Sometimes I’m happy to be in the 1% but here I wouldn’t be.

The one positive of this thread is that a number of people have reported finding defective bookings ahead of time. You will find these amongst the litany of anti BA stuff.

[AJA]

@JDB why are you offended?

You say you “really don’t care about who is to blame as this is entirely irrelevant to ensuring a smooth journey”. But that’s entirely the point.

You say you “don’t endorse BA’s failure to ticket or correctly ticket bookings but I take the simple view that everyone makes mistakes”

But you apportion no blame to BA in its mistake / failure to ticket and put the onus entirely on the consumer to make sure BA has fulfilled its contractual obligation to issue passengers a ticket to enable the customer to fly.

You have no sympathy for customers mistake of failing to check that their itinerary has been ticketed. But forgive BA every time.

Would you concede that it would be helpful for customers if BA had a computer programme to run through all PNRs and check if they are ticketed? If not then flag it to a team to issue the tickets.

[TGLoyalty]

@JDB but it’s BA that should fix their processes I understand the corporate world extremely well and most forward thinking big corporates with half an ounce of sense aren’t blaming the consumer for their own basic failings.

“ I have also clearly stated that I don’t endorse BA’s failure to ticket or correctly ticket bookings but I take the simple view that everyone makes mistakes, BA won’t change this anytime soon so I will take my own precautions.”

It’s all well taking your own precautions like making sure your card is charged, getting their right email etc but there’s not a single instance where I’d blame the consumer for paying their money, getting their card correctly charged and receiving a “here’s you e-ticket…” email and thinking they have a valid e-ticket.

[John]

Today I encountered a few issues when trying to manage some bookings and I thought of this thread.

I have learned something new which is that there is a difference between an e-ticket and an e-ticket receipt.

For the vast majority of the >500 flights I have booked in my lifetime, including all flights on BA or redemptions on BAEC, I never actually get sent the e-ticket but only the e-ticket receipt (which is now obvious as that is exactly what the subject line of the BA email says).

I managed to book a redemption through QRPC which involves a flight on WY (Oman Air) and for some reason the e-ticket receipt does not show the baggage allowance. On querying this with the live chat the agent was able to send me the actual e-ticket which does show it. But I haven’t got the actual e-tickets for any of my other QR bookings, although I probably don’t really need them.

I also had an A3 (Aegean) redemption on TK (Turkish) and the email confirmation doesn’t really show any info, although it had the e-ticket number. I couldn’t manage the booking on the TK website. Later on TK had a schedule change and sent me an email with a completely different PNR. I then realised I needed TK’s PNR rather than A3’s to log in to the TK website. I had to call A3 to change to a more suitable flight and after the call they also emailed me the actual e-ticket, which showed both the A3 and TK PNRs. If their website had sent me the actual e-ticket at the time of booking I would have realised there were two PNRs from the beginning.

I have looked through all my flight bookings and only TG (Thai) automatically sent me the actual e-ticket whereas every other airline has sent an e-ticket receipt.

[JDB]

@TGloyalty – the whole point is that nobody needs to blame anybody. It doesn’t get one anywhere so I won’t trouble my limited brain capacity about that. I do know that BA isn’t that reliable, so my personal self-reliance comes into play to plug the gaps. I imagine that if you make an arrangement over the telephone that is subsequently confirmed in writing you check it concurs, if you buy something you check that you have been charged the correct sum and been given the right goods or tickets, in a restaurant you check the bill etc. etc. There is infinite capacity for mistakes or misunderstandings by either party. Companies are perfectly entitled to make mistakes and even the very best ones do as even the most reliable people do. Yes, BA should improve its systems and make the issue clearer but everyone on this thread knows that BA has ticketing issues and that won’t change tomorrow or next year however much you protest. Mistakes will still occur when they upgrade their systems; that’s life and not just BA life.

@AJA – I don’t forgive BA and I don’t blame them or the consumer as you suggest. My upbringing at home and school (and subsequently my and my wife’s parenting) was one of integrity, personal responsibility and self-help/reliance. I shall stick with that thank you.

As for this idea of some sort of contractual obligation on BA, that really is for the birds. There is also the duty on the customer to mitigate his losses. Even if it had any validity, who in their right mind would rather seek to enforce the contract with all that entails rather than check they had a ticket? Anyone with any meaningful experience of litigation would tell you always to avoid it! Re BA running a search to find un-ticketed PNRs, more than half of all PNRs are intentionally un-ticketed at the time of booking so that wouldn’t work. @TGLoyalty had a better idea along the lines of TK but until that happens, everyone is free not to check and make a big fuss when the sh*t hits the fan because they couldn’t be bovvered but they will at least have the comfort of outpourings of sympathy from posters on this thread after they have missed their flight.

[TGLoyalty]

@JDB I agree mistakes happen but where we disagree is the not trying to lay blame I believe it’s purely BA’s fault if the consumer took all reasonable steps (payments made and email confirmation) and that is that it’s BA on the hook for Duty of care and delay compensation as incorrectly denied boarding.

However, the reality is those payments mean higher fares for all of us so I’d rather they focused on fixing their processes.

Businesses should make mistakes 0.001% of the time not 1% I’d say with the volumes BA does 1% is far too high (obviously sites like this highlight issues and mistakes so it’s not representative of real life)

[JDB]

@TGLoyalty – I have no idea if 1% is the error rate and the ‘gold standard’ error rate varies hugely by industry/sector but I would think your number is unrealistically ambitious for most.

I don’t know how many times I have to repeat it, but I’m not blaming the consumer! What I do believe is that if you know a business isn’t reliable, you need to double check everything. From my perspective, it takes very little time or effort to make up for their shortcomings so I’m not het up about it.

I’m in a much better position to look after my travel than BA is, error free, to look after the millions of passengers it flies every year.

[StanTheMan]

@JDB

“My upbringing at home and school (and subsequently my and my wife’s parenting) was one of integrity, personal responsibility and self-help/reliance. I shall stick with that thank you. ”

It’s odd that someone who claims to teach and parent self reliance and self-help, still has to check all tickets and travel arrangements for their travel party. It’s almost as if you dont trust your own flesh and blood to be capable. Or you think they will also make the heinous mistakes others on this thread have??

[JDB]

@StanTheMan – if you had read this properly, I said I deal with this when they are travelling with me and they largely look after themselves when travelling independently which is fairly frequent. Fortunately they are extremely capable and intelligent people.

It’s important that they are able to navigate the vagaries of modern day travel independently whenever they wish as I could get run over tomorrow and some threads I read seem to veer towards the controlling/coercive spectrum.

Once again, it defies belief that the concept of checking one’s own travel arrangements is quite so controversial. Anyway, each to their own and I shall bring relief to many by saying I shan’t comment on this thread again.

[Ihar]

To try and add some balance:
1. Most people assume they are ticketed and don’t check – which I think is fair (maybe the BA app should highlight if it’s not ticketed yet)
2. When things go wrong, focus on putting it right. You can’t undo it having gome wrong (that’s in the past)
3. The ticketing system is very complex, and mistakes happen. Lots of “corporate users” (travel agents, etc.) can reserve flights without ticketing them – there is nothing unusual about it so the system doesn’t flag it

In my whole life, I have only been non-ticketed due to travel managers’ mistakes. And yes, I’m old enough to remember carbon coupons and ticket sales at the airport desk. It’s not common, and perhaps (as to where this forum is) it happens slightly more frequently to complex Avios bookings??? 🤔