BA computer system

[ianjlloyd]

I had made a booking for flights from Glasgow to London and return. Unfortunately, because of family illness I had to cancel the outward flight and this means that the return flight is also cancelled.

After a long (20 minutes) hold on the phone I spoke to a very pleasant BA person who advised me that if I cancelled with her I would get £15 of my taxes back but if I did it on line I would get £30. I've tried repeatedly to cancel on line but constantly get this message

"Unfortunately our systems are not responding, so we are unable to process your request at the moment.
We apologise for this inconvenience and suggest you try again later."

It is hard to imagine that a major airline's systems would be out of action for a day but does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong?

Many thanks

[PleasureFlyer]

probably due to a lot of people connecting to the site to check strike details etc.

[PAXboy]

It's also the time to book holidays and BA have had a sale on. Try the system at odd hours of the day, as much out of normal hours as your schedule permits.

[ianjlloyd]

I've now solved the problem. In large part my fault but also perhaps a poor computer interface.

I normally book flights with one credit card and when asked by the BA system for the number of the card used inserted this. When I was eventually able to track down the e-ticket receipt on another computer I realised that I had used a different crd for this booking. That was my fault, but I wonder why the BA system could not simply have said - wrong card number - rather than presenting a message which suggested -at least to me - that the system was down?

Thanks for the responses to my query

[PAXboy]

Ah, that virtuous circle:
The people who specify the application
The people who write the application
The people who check the application does what ...
The people who specified the application said.

(I worked in IT for 27 years)

[Joao da Silva]

Validation, not verification Paxboy?

[PAXboy]

I know that software testing cannot provide for EVERY circumstance (been there, helped to write the test scripts and done the testing on other people's scripts) but the error response does seem out of place.

The second problem is that, if you try to tell the company of the problem ... how do you find the right form to fill in and will they even read it? I've given up telling companies about problems in the execution or even simple errors in the text - because they never reply to acknowledge of thank you. So I just 'mark them down' further in my estimation.

[Hartington]

I always kept this in mind as much as I could tree swing pictures - tire swing, tire swing, rope swing cartoon pictures

[PAXboy]

Thanks for the link Hartington, a GREAT site and a good update on those tree swing drawings which I remember very well from the 1980s.