British Airways

 

Well, it looks like the wait is almost over for the refund on my lost luggage which I have been waiting for since last September. As I mentioned in British Airways Customer Service Problems- part 2, and British Airways- lost luggage; my luggage was lost for three days last year on my arrival to Scotland. Because of this my girlfriend and I had to buy new clothes for the first few days.

So we submitted our claim when we got back to Montreal, and amazingly, this week, after almost six months- we get a letter from British Airways.

The letter apologizes for the baggage situation and says we will be getting a check from them soon.

I guess this falls into the “better late then never” category for me. I am not happy about the amount of time this has taken, but I am glad to see that British Airways is doing the right thing.

Follow up: Money was received a couple of days after this post

 

As I mentioned in a previous post, British Airways lost our luggage for three days on my last trip to Scotland. When we came back to Canada we submitted a claim for the clothes we had to buy while waiting for our bags to arrive. This was submitted on the BA website and we got back a standard e-mail response.

Well, as we have waited sixteen weeks now and having never received any response, we decided to call the Baggage claims phone number listed on the website- 1-800-828-8144.

They told me to fax a copy of all relevant information to Customer Service at the following Fax: +1 347-418-4241.

You should try these numbers if you are in North America and have had problems with British Airways.

I am looking forward to see if it works…

Happy New Year everybody!

To start off  the new year, there was a good article in Smarter Travel today called Five Frequent Flyer resolutions for 2007

 The two resolutions I especially liked were:

• I will reevaluate my frequent flyer affiliation. This is something that all of us need to do periodically. I used to be a big fan of British Airways, but with the problems I have had with them, I am now leaning back towards Aeroplan. I also recently joined the Delta Skymiles program as I happened to take a couple of flights with them.
• I will choose the credit card which makes most sense for me. As I have mentioned previously, In my own case, my choice is the MBNA Starwood preferred guest Mastercard. This is available if you are Canadian. You get Starwood points which can be transferred to most airline mileage programs- and it has no annual fee. The only problem is that you cannot convert miles earned on the credit card to Aeroplan. As I have been dissapointed with British Airways, I am on a hunt for a new credit card on which I can earn Aeroplan miles.

I got a nice Chrismas present this morning.

When I opened up my credit card bill today I found that I got a refund from British Airways of over $1,000 for an overcharge on a trip I took earlier this year.

I described the whole sordid story in an earlier post- British Airways Customer Service problems- part 1.

As I did not get anywhere talking to British Airways directly, the guys at Flyertalk suggested that I dispute the charge with my credit card company.

So I did- and got refunded within a month.

What a great holiday gift!

This post is about the second issue that I have had with British Airways. Strangely enough this is also related to the last trip I had with them.

I must preface this by saying that I have used British Airways for at least one hundred flights during the last few years and have had no problems at all; I consider them to be a better then average airline and I would not hesitate to recommend traveling with them. But until now I have never needed to contact their Customer Service department.

As mentioned in a previous post- I went on a vacation to Scotland in late August. We arrived in Scotland but our bags did not. We were given a reference number at the airport and three days later British Airways did deliver the bags to my aunt’s house.

However, as we only had the clothes we were wearing during our travel, we did need to go and buy some clothes and toiletries.

We did not spend a lot of money, and before beginning our return journey we stopped in at the British Airways lost baggage department. The staff there told us that we should make sure that we kept our receipts and that we should make a claim using the internet form on the BA website.

So a few days after our arrival back in Montreal we sent an e-mail using the online form. We got back a standard form letter saying please give us 6-8 weeks to reply. OK fine. But now it has been 10 weeks.

No contact other than a form letter response.

Once again I feel like we have been let down by BA Customer Service.

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. 

Some people do not bother collecting points or frequent flier miles. I used to be one of those people. However, I had been traveling quite a lot for work and one day my boss asked me how many British Airways points I had (as I was usually flying BA). When I told him that I was not a member of their frequent flier club he told me to join immediately and to log my previous six months of flights. Upon doing so I immediately collected 50,000 BA miles, which is enough for a trip from North America to Europe. Wow. That’s how I became very interested in points and miles.

 There are a few basic rules to consider when collecting frequent flier miles- or any kind of points for that matter. These are my top three-

The first rule is to always collect them where you can. They do not cost you anything and they can add up to future flights, hotel stays, or merchandise. My rule is- if you can collect some kind of points you should - and if you are not already a member of their plan- join. It’s free and may add up to something later. The only exception to this is when the item that you are purchasing costs more to collect the points (unusual but it happens).

The second rule is to try and stick to the same points programs, so have primary and secondary programs- it is better to have 60,000 Aeroplan points, for example, then 30,000 Aeroplan and 30,000 BA. The first one can give you a trip to Europe or 2 tickets around North America; the second can’t even get you to Europe. This may seem like it contradicts the first rule, but it does not- try to use your primary program first, then your secondary one, and so on…

The third rule is the importance of understanding expiry, because you do not want your points to go to waste. Either try to use points without expiry, or if your points do expire, know the rules related to this. For example, many people in Canada collect Aeroplan points, but many are not aware that they expire after 3 years of inactivity on the account. Inactivity does not necessarily mean flight inactivity; Esso gives you 1 Aeroplan point for buying $3 of gas; so if you have not collected Aeroplan points in  2 1/2 years you can just buy $3 of gas to collect 1 point and keep the account active. Don’t find out the hard way that you have lost all of your points.

I am going to get into more detail of points programs in future posts. Stay tuned…