British Airways Customer Service Problems- part one

I have been a big fan of British airways up until this year.

On my last trip to the UK I had two major problems. The first of which was that BA overcharged me by $1,000 for my return flight.

You would think that this issue would be easily cleared up by calling in to customer service right? Wrong.

A bit of history… I had booked the flights using BA miles. At the end of my vacation when we got to the airport for our return flight the counter staff could not find my reservation, even with the booking reference that they had sent to me.

The counter staff at Glasgow airport sent us to the service counter where I explained the situation- including the fact that I had bought the tickets with points. The staff there gave me paper tickets and told me that everything was fine.

Imagine my surprise next month when my credit card statement arrived and I was charged an extra $1,100 for my return flights.

So, I called the British Airways Customer Service line. After going through the whole story, and spending some time on hold, the agent confirmed that in their system, instead of giving me the rewards ticket that I ordered- they had issued me regular one way tickets for the return.

What this means is that because I unknowingly used the regular fare return tickets, in their system I still have two unused return tickets which were issued on points. Of course my intention was to travel on the points tickets.

The British Airways agent I spoke to agreed that I should be refunded for the regular tickets, but that she couldn’t do anything herself and that I had to send a fax or e-mail to Customer Service.

That seemed reasonable. So I prepared a seven page fax including all relevant information and faxed it to the customer service department.

This was six weeks ago.

I received Nothing. Not even an acknowledgement, reference number, or confirmation.

I have faced many odd situations in my travels before but never this one- so I took it to the experts. And based on recommendations from the great people at Flyertalk; two weeks ago I initiated a charge dispute with my credit card company.

So I called my credit card company, they asked me to fax all of the information I had, and I have already received a letter confirming the complaint and telling me that they will be investigating this issue.

I am now more comfortable that this will be resolved soon. But it does highlight an incredible deficiency in the way customer service issues are dealt with at British Airways. They could learn something from credit card companies. 

Tags: Air Travel, british airways, Frequent Flier, travel