On Thursday I posted about how British Airways finally shut down their US based call center, and the calls are now being routed to the UK. While I for the most part didn’t love their US call center, I have to say their UK agents are even more surly, at least in my experience.
In that post I expressed one of my major frustrations with Executive Club, which is their policy that you can only phone the call center of the country in which your Executive Club account is registered. That wouldn’t be an issue if their call centers were 24/7, but their US call center for example was only open from 7:30AM till 8PM ET. So if you needed to contact them at other times you were basically hosed and had to wait till their call center opened again in the morning. Living on the west coast made this especially challenging, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve stayed up until 4:30AM just to call British Airways.
Anyway, in that last post reader Khan noted that British Airways has actually changed this policy as of last month, finally. Per this FlyerTalk post:
As part of a programme of changes for our Executive Club Members, we are delivering something that I know you will really welcome following a lot of your feedback on Flyertalk. From today, Executive Club Members can call any service centre to make or change their bookings. This includes both tickets booked with cash or with Avios. You will no longer be asked to call only your local service centre. The numbers that you call will not change and we do encourage to call your local service centre when you are in your country of Membership but we realise that there will be times when you need to reach us wherever you are and our colleagues will be happy to help.
I would say “great job British Airways,” but I think the more appropriate statement is “it’s about damn time.”
So that’s a relief, at least. Now, given that the US phone number is now redirecting to the UK, it’s simply beyond me why they can’t make calling British Airways from the US more efficient, and have the US phone number available 24/7. I suggested this to them on Twitter, and they simply responded with “it is currently not possible.”
I’d love to know what part of that, specifically, is “not possible.”
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