I made a decision a while ago to use British Airways as my carrier of choice.
I applied for the Virgin Flying Club card — and I flew them to the CTIA Las Vegas show in March. I closely evaluated spending the extra thousand pounds on an Upper Class experience, but eventually decided I’d get more use out spending the same amount on a new Mac Pro workstation and screens. I enjoyed the general Virgin Atlantic service but I was extremely surprised to find an antiquated entertainment system that ‘rolled’ videos. It wasn’t on-demand. You had to wait for a film or TV show to finish and then loop in order to watch stuff. For someone who rarely sleeps on-board, lining up a series of movies, on-demand, is one of the best ways of eating up the 11 hours it takes from London to San Francisco. Despite being a big fan of Mr Branson I wasn’t that impressed with the on-board service.
So I’ve been flying British Airways more and more often though. I’ve been finding their pricing pretty competitive and we used them for a lot of the European jaunts for Mobile Industry Review recently.
For the first time I began clocking up airmiles.
I simply never bothered until recently. I either didn’t fly enough or I was carrier agnostic — I’m still in some degree of mourning at the failure of MaxJet/SilverJet (Those services were phenomenal — £800 return to Los Angeles in a business class seat? Nice!)
Every British Airways flight I’ve been on has, generally speaking, been expertly staffed — and the entertainment has been brilliant.
I’ve experienced the odd delay but, well, what can you do about that? Provided the priority is always safety, I’m fine — and I just take a very big book just in case the iPhone battery wears down unexpectedly.
I was quite disappointed on Saturday though. Severely. I was trying to check-in for my British Airways flight back to England using my T-Mobile G1 Android handset. The main page worked. I clicked straight in from the reminder email and browsed the site.. but when I tried to bring up the check-in window, that failed on the G1. I think it’s because the system generated a new window and didn’t maintain a persistent connection — so when the new window opened, I just saw the main BA homepage and not the available seats.
I took out my frustration on Twitter.
I gather Terence from Vodafone had a similar experience this morning — Lisa Whelan pointed this out on Twitter.
And then British_Airways jumped in with a reply:
@lisawhelan @edent @ew4n thanks for letting us know – i’ll pass this on
Bring it on!
It is nice to feel like you’re being listened to, eh? I’m hoping that the web team at British Airways are going to get this feedback soon and do something about it. Why no mobile version of BA? Or… an iPhone app, maybe?
