Yesterday many of us noticed that our British Airways Avios balances were zeroed out to supposedly protect us from being hacked.
It was rather odd that British didn’t (and still hasn’t) communicated with us about exactly what is going on.
I wrote a post last night, Hey British Airways, Where Are My Avios.
My plan was to call BA after the weekend if my Avios weren’t restored to my account and inquire as to what was going on.
I decided to tweet a link to my post to the @British_Airways Twitter account, hoping but not really expecting a response.
I didn’t think much more about my tweet during the rest of the day until I had a notification. I figured it had something to do with other, more recent posts but I was happy to see a response from BA!
The tweet included some important details about what happened as well as what will happen with my Avios which are currently not in my account.
Here is the tweet:
It turns out and like stated in last night’s post, BA has protected our Avios. I want to say good job to them and thank you, but wouldn’t it be nice to let your customers know that you emptied their accounts for just that reason?
I have to say that if I had randomly logged in and saw a zero balance, it’s safe to say I may have freaked out! Well maybe not exactly, but it would’ve been of great concern.
Through the tweet, British Airways also said that Avios will be automatically re-credited to my account in the coming days.
Since I am not in a rush to use my Avios, I’ll be waiting for my Avios to return and see no need in calling in after the weekend.
What do you think of this whole event with our Avios going adios without any warning?
Could British have handled it and communicated what was going on a bit better? I’d say for sure, yes….
Glenn- Communication is definitely essential in this situation.
JEM- Right. If I was looking to immediately book an award flight, then this would’ve been a major pain. I am sure this was an inconvenience for many but at least our Avios are safe. It’s just too bad they didn’t somehow let us know what was going on.
Roger Wilco- I haven’t seen the notification e-mail since I didn’t receive one. I only got some info about what was going on since I tweeted BA! I was able to reset my password without issue yesterday. Besides our Avios supposedly being protected, they did handle this situation from a customer service perspective, quite poorly.
Total screw-up on part of BA.
Some people got no communications. Others get one which looked and smelled like a phishing e-mail and blaming their customers (NB – that was the ONLY communication BA sent to their customers). There is nothing on this on their website to inform about this issue.
Instead of locking down accounts, they zeroed them, with an “ex-gratia” line – “out of thankfulness”?
Their website doesn’t work to reset the account passwords – it won’t send out the e-mail with the details how to do it. Or if by chance it does, the included link is “expired”
Their phone service is in shambles, agents were not briefed, they say whatever. And yes, customer service is closed in the UK over the weekend – who would think of a global airline to have customer service in their home country every day?
And the list of total mismanagement of the issue could just go on and on.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were more concerned with locking things down than providing notifications. While some bloggers were panicking, 98% of their customers still may not know OR CARE, as long as their points are restored relatively soon.
Yes, they could have immediately initiated a DOS (denial of service) attack on their own servers by sending out a million emails (note all the “me too” comments in the blogs), but I suspect this will get a postmortem, and a better response will be crafted for the next time (should there be one).
Everything they did was fine except the complete lack of communication. That’s inexusible.