Unable to select seats on rebooked-but-unticketed 241 booking

[conspicuous-capybara]

Hi folks,

I artificially extended my 241 voucher late last year with an INV-LHR flight and used it to rebook the actual flights I wanted, an open-jaw LHR-YVR JFK-LHR journey in the summer. The INV-LHR flight was last week and had stuck around in my booking in weird ways, e.g. on the web I can’t select a meal, claiming “You can’t choose a meal this close to your flight time” for both transatlantic segments, and the mobile app still has the INV-LHR segment in the booking.

However, the booking hasn’t been reticketed and this doesn’t allow me to select seats, which would be a concern at least on the LHR-YVR leg in late July on an A380 with the old CW seats – at the very least I’d like to be able to select a good window pair on the upper deck, which I may not be able to if I have to wait until this gets manually reticketed shortly before departure. I messaged BA on Twitter and first got one guy who wanted to help select seats, but was thereafter replaced by another person who basically said there’s nothing I could do until the flight gets reticketed, and there was no offer of him reticketing it for me.

Would I be able to get my flight reticketed by braving hours of the call centre hold music, or at the very least have them help me book seats, or is this BA policy and I’m SOL until someone gets through the backlog sometime this summer?

Thanks for any assistance!

[Thegasman]

Call centre won’t be able to help I’m afraid. Reticketing is a back office team & they’re queue is dynamic & prioritised solely on proximity to departure date. You can’t get put through to ticketing team & they don’t have an e-mail address or other means of contacting them. Unfortunately this is one of the disadvantages of using the FTV trick to extend a 241.

[NorthernLass]

Also the meal selection is still disabled for everyone so you’re probably getting chicken Tikka Massala!

[conspicuous-capybara]

@Thegasman: That’s a shame – and the call centre staff won’t be able to select seats on an unticketed booking either? Hopefully they’re able to clear the backlog at least a couple of weeks before I’m flying out so I can get in there before bronze/blue members get their free seat selection. Thanks for confirming, either way!

@NorthernLass: Hah! I wasn’t expecting meal selection, especially this far out, I just found it amusing that the reason given for it being disabled was that the flights are too close to departure (at 5+ months out).