Gulliver | Flying the flag

The website of British Airways needs to become clearer

Britain’s flag carrier should be doing more to show that it has earned its privileged position at Heathrow

By D.F.

THE email message confirming a booking with British Airways (BA) is reassuring. It reminds you to check the booking carefully. And if you have made a mistake, you may cancel your booking and claim a refund without penalty within 24 hours.

But the information provided can be inadequate and, in some cases, downright misleading. Imagine, for example, that you want to check that your flight is changeable. The booking-confirmation email does not tell you. Never mind, you can click on “Manage my booking”, and then click on the particular leg of the flight you might want to change. You find a menu that includes a button saying “Change/Cancel booking”. Click on that button and the screen tells you that “Time/date changes permitted at any time before each flight departure for a change fee of £150…plus any difference in fare.”

So the passenger could reasonably assume that it’s safe to stick with the ticket and change the time later if need be, if you are prepared to pay the fee and risk any fare difference. Except that, when you later actually try to make a change, you may discover (as your correspondent recently did) that flight is in fact non-changeable. Had you realised that in advance you might have chosen to take the option of cancelling the booking within 24 hours.

Attempts to point out to BA that it is misleading its passengers fall on deaf ears. Its customer-service representatives point out, correctly, that at the time of booking online the restrictions on the flight are displayed. Yet it is easy to miss these (they were in the small print at the bottom of the page at the end of the booking process). And the failure to make restrictions on changes clear in the booking-confirmation email, as well as the false information provided on the website, amount to shoddiness unworthy of a flag-carrier, and one that owes its dominant position at Heathrow Airport more to an accident of history than open competition.

BA’s slogan is “To Fly. To Serve.” The reality is sometimes shabbier: “To Fly. To Serve up Misinformation.”

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