You can beat the buggers at BA – but it’s not easy – oh no, you can’t

I thought I’d take a break from moaning about our corrupt, useless politicians and bureaucrats and attack our least favourite airline instead.

As anyone who has flown with BA will know, BA staff are a bunch of arrogant, unhelpful, overpaid buggers in more ways than one. My latest contretemps with BA concerns missing airmiles.

In 2011/12 I took my good lady wife on a round-the-world trip for 7 months with BA/Quantas. On returning in April 2012, I found the airmiles for half the flights had not been credited to my and my wife’s accounts. So I rang BA in May 2012, explained which flights were missing and they promised to sort things out. Yesterday, I tried to book a BA flight with my airmiles only to find that 8 months later the airmiles were still missing from my account. So I rang BA again.

BA’s first attempt to fob me off was to claim that as the flights were taken over 6 months ago, I had forfeited the airmiles. So I pointed out that I had called them within 3 weeks of my return to have the missing airmiles credited.

BA’s next fob-off was to claim that they kept records of all calls and there was no mention on my account that I had called in May 2012. Therefore according to BA, I had not called and was just lying in order to get airmiles which were forfeited. But I was able to find my phone bill which showed I had called BA at 07.54 on 4 May 2012 and spoken to them for 10 minutes and 36 seconds.

But BA was not beaten yet. Next they said that even if I had called just after my trip, it didn’t matter as they would not give me the airmiles unless I could send them copies of the boarding passes for the flights. (These were flights that were taken more than a year earlier!) I could sense the triumph in the BA “customer service” respresentative’s voice as he came up with this new excuse to get rid of me. Now don’t ask me how or why, but I had a pile of old papers I had been meaning to throw away and amongst them were the boarding passes from 3 of the 4 flights for which I had not got the airmiles.

At this point, BA’s “customer service” guy fell silent. I guess he had come to the end of the preprinted list of useful excuses to use when irritating idiots like me rang up to get missing airmiles.

So he asked me to scan the boarding passes and promised my wife and I would get our airmiles. Victory! I’ve just checked and I’ve got my airmiles.

Oh no, disaster! I’ve just tried to use my airmiles to book two “free” return tickets to Nice. With BA’s “free” tickets using my airmiles, I’d have to pay £112 per person in taxes. But if I fly EasyJet, the total cost for each person is less than £80. So it’s cheaper to pay full EasyJet prices than using my airmiles for “free” BA tickets.

So much for getting my missing airmiles. What a bunch of useless, lying, BAst–ds BA are. BTW, I’ll have a much more amusing BA story for you tomorrow.