[Mark Caswell]

BA has provided us with the following information regarding the carrier’s revamped website. What are readers’ views on the changes?

“British Airways’ website, ba.com, has received a make-over that delivers a new look and feel and makes managing bookings, accessing the Executive Club and visiting the site from mobile phones and tablets even easier.

The latest features include:

– An easier booking process – it’s even easier to search and book flights and holidays now, with a simplified experience to guide customers more naturally through the process. It shows the most relevant information based on a customer’s search and a clearer path of where they are in the booking process. The underlying technology of these pages has changed to be even more reliable.

– Fast access to upcoming flights – when customers log in to their ba.com account, they’ll now see a summary of their upcoming flights on the homepage as part of a next flights section. These were previously listed in the Executive Club account section.

– Account information in one place – Executive Club Members will now have all their important account information such as Avios balance and recent transactions available from the home page in a new section called ‘my account details’.

– The full mobile experience – the ba.com home page and the selling pages are now fully optimised for mobile phones and tablets so the experience will be consistent irrespective of which platform customers choose to use. Changes have also been made so that the content from the pages is delivered consistently across any size of device.

The new look pages and features have launched for most customers booking flights from the UK and are being rolled out worldwide over the coming months.

Jack Smith, Head of Digital at British Airways, said: “We all expect the ability to manage our lives on-line, from any device at any time, so we’re focused on ensuring our site is fully accessible and very simple and intuitive to use. The updates mean that just a few short clicks will enable a customer to book a flight, and following a log-in, a complete list of upcoming flights and Executive Club account information is now immediately to hand.

The newly designed payment and personal information pages all observe the same high level of security that customers currently receive and expect from British Airways.”

[openfly]

The job experience teenager who devised the new look time-table section should be highly embarrassed!!

[FrequentTraveller]

Whenever an organization states they have made their web site suitable for use with tablets, what they end up doing is making it sub-optimal for PC web browsers. By making the fonts bigger, wider spacing between fields, more scrolling up and down or introduce more steps to the order/booking process. The new BA site has made the PC web browser experience worse than before.

Also the new booking pages have removed the ability to enter a land line telephone number without a mobile telephone number.

In the past when making a booking for a relative who does not own a mobile telephone number there was an option to explicitly state no mobile and enter the telephone number as a land line number.

Since the BA.com UK site change, I was able to get around this new restriction by entering the booking through the BA site for another country. If they are going to roll out the same restriction to other country sites then this work around will eventually be removed too.

I fear just entering a land line telephone number in the mobile telephone number field on the booking page, may result it BA sending flight change notifications which won’t be recognized and received. If there is a problem then BA will just claim they have sent a notification to “mobile number” on the booking and it’s not their fault it was not received. Not helpful.

[capetonianm]

I looked at the BA website earlier today to check some flights. I only travel BA if there’s no other option or if BA is substantially cheaper for PE or Business than the airlines I prefer. It wasn’t, but I found the new website clumsy and non-intuitive, and I didn’t even get to trying to make a booking. The previous one had its deficiencies, I wonder if the new one has corrected them. I haven’t even tried the app on my Android.

There are so many things wrong with BA, with their website/IT, with the direction they are taking, and with their products, that when when flying to/from the UK, they are about my sixth choice. The sad thing is that their frontline staff really care, and really try hard.

As openfly says, it’s the work experience teenagers who are to blame for so much, but ultimately that blame has to be attributed to the managers who made the decisions to cut costs to the bone.

¿Alex, estas eschuchando?

[FDOS_UK]

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

When they have a website that is stable and reliable, I may be more impressed.

[Nogbad01]

Like much of BA IT it seems to be pretty much untested.
An attempt to add a hotel during a booking yesterday resulted in a “page not found” error and the then when I hit “Back” it took me back to the start of the process. Thereby losing my flight selections etc.

This kind of thing happens so frequently that I cannot help but think they just don’t bother doing any kind of testing.

We are not the customers. We are the beta testers.

[capetonianm]

It would be fine if it worked, even if it looks like a dog’s dinner. I have just sent the following message to BA through their ‘contact us’ part of the website.

I had several attempts at booking this flight (details removed) for my wife (name removed) on your website. At the penultimate stage each time it just didn’t respond. At this point other websites worked so the problem was not with my computer or internet connection, although I am sure you would try to pass blame away from yourselves.

Eventually after a lot of time wasted and frustration I was able to book it on the BA app.

If it were not for the fact that she needed LHR flights this time I would have booked easyJet, which we use for the majority of our shorthaul flights, as their website is functional, clear, and easy to use.

You must be losing a lot of business due to your appalling IT. If you wish to call me to discuss this you have my number in the profile.

(name removed)

[GivingupBA]

Thanks for the information, but what I care about is the hard product and specifically the Club World seat (which I consider to be now 15 years out of date) and the Club Europe seat (not worth the money, in my opinion). I care very little about the website.

[capetonianm]

I completely agree, but the topic is the website, not the hard product (which is also very poor.)

[GivingupBA]

[quote quote=847586]I completely agree, but the topic is the website, not the hard product…
[/quote]

OK, good point and I agree I didn’t comment on the website except to say I care very little about it (admittedly not a helpful comment).

[Montysaurus]

I tend to agree with the other posters that the site is clumsy. I also find that typing is delayed – I type something when booking eg LHR but the box remains blank for several seconds before LHR comes up on the screen. An IT expert I know says that this is a defect on certain poorly created sites. When I tried the new site during testing my original comment about the original was that BA obviously felt that “it ain’t broke so let’s fix it!”.

[Ah,Mr.Bond]

It is awful, truly awful. Where once you could obtain flights by inputting where you want to go on the homepage, dates, class, number of passengers all in one box, you now have to go through this process via numerous different pages before you get the flight selection, each one jumps up and down all over the place as well, checking a box before it takes you to the next screen to input the passenger numbers and travel class. The display of the flights when you finally get it is also no where near as clear as before, especially should you want to chose different dates, mix cabins etc. It is dreadful.
I have fedback on 2 occasions, and guess what? No reply!
It is clearly only been developed for tablet app use – on a PC it is utterly useless.
TOP TIP!!! – One way round it is to select Australia or elsewhere as your country….. it then automatically defaults to the old style [for now !!!]

[Nogbad01]

still lots of bugs.

Today I booked a flight to MRS.

Apparently I am in seats:

1A (Window) For the MAN-LHR leg and
1A (Middle) For the LHR-MRS leg.

Guess I will be sitting on the tray then!

[nevereconomy]

heartily agree wit the Dog’s Dinner/Pig’s Breakfast comment- so many carriers have horrible websites – do they not know
that is now their front office?

[capetonianm]

I am glad to report that BA went out of their way to send me a detailed, helpful, individualised reply, with an apology and an explanation of what went wrong during the process. They’ve also offered me a free First class ticket to anywhere on their global network. Truly outstanding customer service from an airline that cares.

I am positively overwhelmed by the level of interest and concern they have shown and will naturally be switching all our private and business travel to BA.

Please find below your personal assistance reply from British Airways.

If you have any questions after reading our message, don’t hesitate to reply to this email – or if your query is urgent you can telephone our Customer Support team:
http://www.ba.com/contact

Subject : I had several attempts at booking this flight for my wife (xxxxxxx [Incident: xxxxxxxxxx]

Response By Email (xxxx) (24/01/2018)
Dear Mr xxxxxx

Thank you for writing to the Club about having problem while using our website.

I am sorry you are having difficulties using our website.

Please contact our Web Support team on 0344 493 0787. Opening hours are 06:00 – 20:00 daily.

Please do let us know if we can help you with anything else.

I understand that this is not ideal, and I hope any future use of our website is more positive.

Kind regards
xxxxxx
British Airways Executive Club
Tell us what you think of our service today – Your feedback is very important to us, whether positive, neutral or negative. It helps us understand what is most valuable to you in shaping our products and services in the future. To begin please click here:
https://askba-faqemail.custhelp.com/ci/documents/detail/5/78/12/e72de0a41bee34751f38fda8206e4885131017d4

Edit :
As a further example of their amazing dedication to customer care, when I click on the link above to the survey, this is the response :

Generic Company Marketing Site
Survey Expired

This survey is no longer accepting responses. Expired: 02/01/2018 11.59 PM

[Author]

Posts