Automatic seat allocation – what are BA doing?

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Viewing 5 posts - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)

  • K1ngston
    Participant

    couldn’t put it better myself canucklad ….. I dont have to pre pay for seats but I was trying to sort seats out for my son recently and I went on to the site and realised they were asking £24-45 more per seat depending on where you wanted to sit ….. They can go ***** themselves I thought and phoned the Exec line to tell them my status and they told me makes not a jot of difference as I am not the passenger, albeit its my credit card paying the bill…

    In this case all the analogies you mention come to mind, just one more reason why the Worlds Favourite Airline isn’t anymore …..


    nevereconomy
    Participant

    I think BA makes it very clear that to be guaranteed the seat of your choice you have to pay unless you have a certain Tier status.
    If sitting together is important, to me that would mean paying. Computers have no sense of logic so I would not expect one to give me two seats together because of names – especially when dealing with a profit-making concern that can make more money if I have to pay to choose. The airline seat game is not complicated – if you want to be sure, pay for it. Even Emirates is on to that..
    As far as changes after the fact, I always check at various times before a trip to make sure that a time or equipment change has
    not changed my seat. A trip on AA next week has had my seat changed 3 times since booking. An itinerary change is certainly enough to cause that.


    DavidGordon10
    Participant

    LP – an interesting idea and of course it would be much better for the passenger: but the airline would never do this, because part of the ploy is to hack the “headline” price down as low as possible to tempt you – and then to whack in the extras once you have been caught.

    Canucklad: perfect analogy. With the beer it is not so difficult to go to the next pub, but with an airline there may be little or no alternative (as with my LGW – BDA – LGW booking).

    Nevereconomy – I am sorry, no. Two pax with the same surname and the same address and booked on the same booking, by default will want to sit together unless divorce is impending. The implication of the behaviour of BA is that the computer is programmed to seat them apart, in an attempt to gouge the extra cash out of the bemused passengers. “To fly, to rip off”.


    SCF
    Participant

    I have been trying very hard to get to Silver status so that I can get free seat allocation at the time of purchase of the tickets, but as reflected in the first post, BA does mess around with seat selection. At Bronze I managed to choose my seats (2 adults booked under the same booking ref) 7 days before departure, which I do often. However, as experienced by DavidGordon, somehow BA separated us a few days before departure. I was amazed but at least I found out before the seat selection was disabled (apparently just over 24 hours before departure), I managed to choose my original seats (2 together). And this is a full Club Europe fare that I had paid!
    On the next flight LGW – NCE 3 days ago the same thing happened.
    If this is an IT error then I am afraid BA has a lot of work to do! And this is only a short haul flight. Imagine being separated from your colleague/wife/husband/bf/gf/children on a 12 hour flight???


    Polly
    Participant

    David,
    Same happening over at Ryan Air. as BT discussed few weeks ago. They claim it’s not deliberate, and blame their computer, but l think BA have now cottoned on to this system to increase revenue. Very lucrative, and yet another nasty “enhancement”

Viewing 5 posts - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)
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