BA STANDS FOR BLOODY AWFUL
Jasper Griffin on the costly dangers of booking
online with the airline formerly known as the world's favourite
THE more devices we have to make life easier, the more they entangle and impede us. One gets new examples all the time. It happened that I recently needed to travel to Berlin. I needed, in fact, to go to that historic city on Sunday, 13 October. give a lecture there on the Monday morning, and fly straight home. Once the journey would have taken days; now it takes two hours. But progress, of course, does not move in quite such straight lines as that superficial observation suggests.
By evil chance it happened that on 26 September, the very day on which I thought of going to a travel agent and buying a ticket, there appeared on my email screen an advertisement for British Airways, bright in colour and cheery in tone, welcoming me — me, by name — to its New Improved Schedule, and inviting me to book online. Naturally, I was flattered. They know me there! I am dealing with friends! The hope, alas, was sadly premature. For when I had typed in what I wanted — flying out at 12.45 on the 13th — back came a message to say that I was booked, and charged, to fly out at 9.30 on the 6th — a date in any case impossible for me, as at that very moment I was due to present a set of accounts at a meeting of old members of Balliol.
Now, I may not be one of the world's great IT wizards, but I usually do a lot better than that: wrong day and wrong time? Surely not. However, said Ito myself in my innocence, no great harm done; I'll simply ring BA and get it put right. Perhaps there will be a little good-natured chaff at my expense, but there it is. So I rang at once and tried to book another flight, for the right dates. It turns out, however, that booking online is a dangerous business and may be a very expensive one. BA can and will charge for a slip, and it does. My credit card was now charged for two trips to Berlin.
I never actually got a ticket for the right dates. The only one BA sent me was, sure enough, to go out on the 6th. I quite thought I might, on arrival at Heathrow, be charged for a third ticket; though in the event that did not happen. But there was, of course, the frustrating business of trying to get a response from BA: the old story of a butterfly versus a mammoth (the smart money is never on the butterfly). The telephone calls: five times I was played light classical music and informed of a 15 per cent reduction on flights to Dubai. The emails: seven separate but identical automated replies, from different bits of BA, informing me that 'The sending address for this email is an automated account. This message should not be replied to.' Perhaps I might get that set to music, as a sevenpart round. It has a dying fall.
There were some slightly brighter spots, a few tiny oases of comparative humanity, in that bureaucratic desert. I got the occasional answer: nice Alexandra thanked me for 'taking the time' (she didn't know the half of it) `to contact us by email'. James, too, was very kind: he thanked me for my email. As for Luke, he was more than nice: he was so chummy — 'Dear Jasper', he began — that I felt quite hopeful; he, too. I was touched to see, was grateful for my email; but he only informed me that 'currently, we cannot cancel bookings via the BA website. To do this, please contact the BA General Enquiries Department.' But perhaps Ethan was the one I liked best of all. On 13 October he asked me to be patient: 'Different departments have different response times,' he pleaded. I don't know if it's true: I have found them remarkably uniform. But he did thank me for writing. I valued that.
Meanwhile, I had been told that I could appeal directly only to the CEO. Greatly daring, with beating heart. I wrote to him, to the great Mr Rod Eddington himself! I was so looking forward (shall I confess it?) to our making friends. I thought we were going to have quite a lot of shared experience, Rod and I, as I worked my way round BA and its departments. But that hope, like some lovely flower, its stem bruised by the plough, drooped and dwindled and died. No answer for ten days, then a letter from poor Rod's secretary, explaining that he was too busy just now to write. Well, imagine! Of course, I felt terrible. Such a busy man, and there was I, trying to waste his time on my petty concerns!
So there it is. If you book online, read, heed, and mark the warnings. BA assures me that I must have been warned of the high cost of a slip, and I dare say I was; though I confess that, were it not for my implicit faith in BA's truthfulness and freedom from error — my dear wife compares it to the unblemished faith of a young curate in the orthodoxy of his bishop — I should be tempted to wonder whether I really can, in that original booking, have got both the day and the hour wrong.
As for the lecture in Berlin, I had a bit of an adventure there, too. The first taxi got a puncture. The driver of the second could not find the place where I was to lecture, and he drove me around the city for the best part of two hours. He was decent enough to be embarrassed, and after a time he turned off the meter. But then, he was a Turk, and they are a people with a keen sense of honour.
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