Rebooking an inflexible ticket — potentially useful inconsistency in pricing

[memesweeper]

Following the incompetence of a family friend I have been tasked with rebooking two return legs of a fully unflown return to Malaga from London. The BA online tool inside Manage My Booking offers two ways to do this:

First method select “all passengers” and go through a more modern looking interface. Price quoted appears to be the price for two brand new one way legs, perhaps more. There is no reminder check for getting consent of all passengers.

Second method select “some passengers” and go through a more old school looking interface. At no point does it ask which passengers are in scope for the change, but does check you have consent for all. Price quoted appears to £60 change fee plus difference in fare. All passengers are in the change (as they are for first method).

In my case the second method is substantially cheaper than the first, and I only discovered it by chance.

Later today I’ll phone up and find out what the BA random number generator suggests they want to charge for a call centre change.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised BA allow changes on these tickets at all.

[AndrewT]

Interesting – may be one of the ‘work in progress’ IT developments. AFAIK you cannot make a change for some but not all of the passengers on any given PNR, despite what it seems to offer. If I click ‘All passengers’ it then generates a ‘Do you have consent for all’ box on the same screen before proceeding, if I click ‘Some passengers’ the confirmation is later.

On the booking I’ve just looked at the price comes out the same either way, however it is presented rather differently. First route simply offers alternative flights for a cost of £xxx (per person), second route initially makes clear there will be a £60 pp change fee, then goes through flight selection to end up with the same price.

[memesweeper]

I just tried the call centre and a fantastically unhelpful lady was eventually cajoled into presenting some even more expensive prices for a few of the flights, and then proceeded to lie to me about their being no availability on any of the others.[1]

I think I’ve found the cause of the discrepancy though. The “some passengers” journey through the website offers returns to all London airports, the “all passengers” journey only offers the original destination. I was confusing two similarly timed returns, a Gatwick one being substantially less than the Heathrow flight.

So the useful inconsistency is simply, where there are multiple airports in play, pretend to only need to change one passenger’s flight, and you might get a better price.

[1] the call started with a “would you be prepared to be called back for a survey” which I opted in to. I was called back, got a brief intro, sixty seconds of silence, and the call terminated. When an organisation can’t do quality control on it’s quality control things really are lost.