BA introduces option to hold flight price for a fee

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  • Anonymous
    Guest

    passionateflyer
    Participant

    BA has today introduced the option to hold a fare for up to 72 hours (excluding award bookings). More details available on

    http://www.ba.com/holdbooking

    £5 per person for short haul/£10 per person for long haul. No exceptions that I can see for exec members of any tier. This fee will be refunded if you go ahead and purchase the flights within the 72 hour window.

    Significant exclusion is that it’s not valid on flights departing within 21 days, or for flights departing from certain countries.

    Cathay Pacific offer customers to hold fares for 24 hours for free (introduced recently).

    Thoughts anyone?


    canucklad
    Participant

    Money grabbing ……..again!


    TimFitzgeraldTC
    Participant

    Well it is offering a service that agents can do in most cases for free – and with exclusions that agents don’t have. So basically it is trying to replicate the service an agent can offer whilst charging for it.


    Tramor01
    Participant

    SAS allow you to book on line and then cancel within 24 hours for free…..


    openfly
    Participant

    So now that BA have increased the credit card fee to £5, will they charge this to pay the £5 reservation fee??! Bet they do.

    It’s amazing that Little Red and Easyjet are charging minimal amounts for credit card use. Just paid 81 pence cc charge for a £53 Little Red fare. And BA are charging £5 per person on the booking…unbelievable. It must really annoy BA that they can’t charge for credit cards ex-Europe.


    MartynSinclair
    Participant

    I thought BA Golds can cancel on line tickets within 24 hours of purchase, but do obviously then have to wait for the refund…


    JordanD
    Participant

    Calling it a fee is a tad erroneous; it’s more a deposit.

    Go forward with the booking, and the ‘fee’ is taken off your ticket price; decide not to go forward and you forfeit your deposit.

    How is that moneygrabbing, canucklad?


    MartinJ
    Participant

    Well done, BA! This is a really useful feature. It does away with the chicken and egg problem of having to find a good fare (often non-refundable) and arranging meetings. @ Tim: travel agents rarely work for nothing and I prefer paying 10 quid to BA rather than 40 to my t.a. if holding the booking for 72 hours is all I need.


    canucklad
    Participant

    Morning Jordan
    Let me put it another way…….I’m assuming you have a favourite popular restaurant or indeed a hotel.

    You phone up to reserve a table/ room for Saturday the 20th of September for 2. They ask for a deposit, in case you don’t turn up as they are very busy. Fair enough you say.

    Tomorrow, you discover that your plans have changed; you phone up and do the right thing by cancelling your booking, to be told you’ve forfeited your deposit.
    Do you think your table or room is going to be empty on the 20th?
    And when I think about it, will this stop BA overbooking flights and bumping people off?

    It’s a marketing tool that actually plays on our brain. Once you pay for something, even a deposit your brain believes you’re committed to the purchase. Hence the reason I suspect that they have differentiated between short and long haul . So very clever from BA marketing, not so clever from BA customer service.

    Now if it had been to hold a seat within 21 days I might have thought otherwise!
    So I stand by my “money grabbing” statement


    JordanD
    Participant

    Each to their own, canucklad. Like others, I think this is a positive, useful step. I trust you think that other airlines who operate a hold fee are also “moneygrabbing”?


    passionateflyer
    Participant

    I do think some of the responses seem quite disproportionate! You don’t HAVE to pay this, it’s an optional service for something BA didn’t offer before.

    You still have 24 hours to cancel a booking and receive a full refund regardless of fare rules (an option open to all passengers). If you choose to hold the price for 72 hours and then go ahead with the booking, they will refund you the holding fee. Most people who hold the flights will go ahead with them IMO and will benefit from having time to get all the money together etc (groups of friends travelling most likely) and as they’d be likely to go ahead they won’t actually end up paying the fee as it will be refunded to them.

    @openfly There are no credit card charges on the holding fee.

    Slight technicality, the holding fee is not taken off the price of the ticket, it gets refunded as a separate transaction as soon as you book.


    Cwyfan
    Participant

    It takes a long time for a refund to return in my experience, so not having to pay and reclaim, might be a good deal in some circumstances.

    AA offer the same, but are very kind with award flights, with a 5 day window, allowing you to buy extra miles if needed in that time. That would be a useful service from BA too, and might even be a revenue generator!


    BA744fan
    Participant

    Will the holding period apply at the end of a sale period? Hold a reservation on the last day of a BA sale and effectively have another 3 days to pay for it.


    TimFitzgeraldTC
    Participant

    Hi BA744fan

    My guess is that sale fares will not be extended beyond the last date of a sale fare. It does state that if you don’t see the “Hold Booking” option then it won’t offer it for the seats one is looking at (might also apply to some of there instant purchase economy fares).

    •If you don’t see this information then, unfortunately, you cannot hold the booking.

    So my guess is that you won’t be able to do this. But until someone tries I don’t know the answer to that as it doesn’t say in the T&C’s.

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