BA.com - making travel far more difficult!

I recently booked a flight via ba.com. The booking process itself was straight-forward enough and seemed to work like any other service. I assumed I had booked standard tickets - there were certainly no warnings, messages or areas of small print that I was instructed to read given the flights I'd chosen. So, I went ahead and booked.

I waited for my confirmation email. I waited about 12 hours and then it arrived.

A few days later my plans changed a little - no problem I thought - you can manage everything on the ba.com site. I'll just go online and amend a few of the flight times I'd chosen.

When I got to the relevant page all the options for 'change flight' etc had been 'greyed-out'. If I clicked on them I got a 404 error message (NOT a message about the type of ticket I'd bought or the restrictions on it).

So, thinking that the website was broken I got on the phone to change my flights. I waited for someone to answer. I waited about 25 minutes. I was annoyed. The music playing down the line was making me more and more irriated (I think there must be a special department in these big corporates who sit around all day trying to think of the most dreadful songs to damage your ear drums with!).

When I got through to someone (name not forthcoming, mono-tone, uninterested voice etc etc) I found out I had purchased (unbeknown to me) non-changeable and non-refundable tickets. Great.

I just found the whole thing quite pathetic and felt it was all a bit of a con.

Sort out your web self service BA! Not good enough.

Chris Norwood