“Sorry, we regret to advise that this section of the website is temporarily unavailable”. This is the sort of message you might expect to see when you click on an old and forgotten link to an online article that has long been deleted or moved.
In this case, however, the message is regularly appearing on the global homepage of the main British Airways website. The reason why the website keeps disappearing into the ether remains a mystery after more than four days.
British Airways customers first reported encountering issues with BA.com on Saturday but days later, the intermittent outages keep on occurring. A request for comment from British Airways went unanswered.
Frequent flyers are no doubt unsurprised. British Airways is renowned for its dodgy IT infrastructure, and however frustrated customers are by the current issues, they can at least take comfort in the fact that the latest IT woes haven’t completely grounded the airline like in previous years.
Customers should, though, expect more from an airline that has promised to pump £750 million over the next three years to improve its dilapidated IT systems, including ridding BA’s website and app of bugs and finally introducing full online serviceability.
It’s not just the main homepage that keeps on disappearing, however. Customers have reported a slew of error messages preventing them from checking in for flights, accessing their frequent flyer account, or even opening the airline’s smartphone app.
The latest issues could, though, be a sign of imminent improvements to come. British Airways has hired a team of 200 IT experts to help overhaul the airline’s computer infrastructure, which will include a new look website with improved functionality.
The project has been codenamed ‘Nexus’ and amongst the upgrades being worked are full online self-service functionality, as well as features that might not prove to be so popular, including dynamic live pricing.
No airline website is fully self service online so it’s not going to be that big a change from what you can do online now as, there is always going to be plenty of times where you will need to contact the call centre but hopefully for minor changes ie reward bookings etc it should be simpler . The website normally works quite well for me but I think some of the bugs definitely need to be fixed and all airlines operate dynamic pricing based on demand so it’s nothing new unfortunately