How long between payment taken and ticketing?

[YH]

I made a booking a while back for which I had a PNR and seats allocated but the payment was never taken due to an issue. I called up BA and made the payment using a different card which was sent to the ticketing queue.

A few days later I saw on my amex card notifications that the payment had been taken but I still have not received any confirmation email and my booking in MMB does not show a ticket number.

Does anyone know how long the delay between payment being taken and the reservation being ticketed is?

[Thegasman]

How long is a piece of string? If your reservation needs to be dealt with by the back office ticketing team (& it sounds like it does or you would have had a ticket number within 48 hours if it had gone down the automatic pathway) then it will now be in a dynamic queue.

The queue is prioritised solely on time to departure ie. the closer you get the higher you move but anyone with a more imminent departure will still jump ahead of you. Unfortunately you can’t communicate with the ticketing team by phone, e-mail or any other method & status, class of travel etc makes no difference. With all of the rebookings recently it’s not unheard of for ticketing to only occur in the week or even 48hours before departure.

Two things do give me pause for thought in your scenario though. 1) why did the payment not go through first time – this may indicate that it’s not a vanilla routing/fare. The most common reason by far that reservations are sent to ticketing is for a complex fare calculation. Generally if the fare is straightforward then it would be processed immediately.

2) Is there a cleared transaction on your Amex or is it pending? Normally they would do a pre authorisation before they send to ticketing much like a hire car deposit. The ticketing team would then process payment when they issue ticket.

There are scenarios where payment would be taken but ticketing would be delayed but they are less common.

[YH]

It seems I was a bit too keen with my post – the flight was ticketed successfully this morning!

To answer your questions anyway…

1) I had rebooked a flight using the 241 extension hack, and to pay the additional taxes I put down a Mastercard instead of an Amex for the payment. This didn’t go through so called back to use an Amex for payment instead.

2) The transaction was pending at the time of my original post but is now cleared.

Thanks for the useful information regardless, I’ll keep that in mind for future reservations.