Why is British Airways not selling business class on some services?

When business class is available on a flight, you would expect to be able to book it. Something is wrong at British Airways, as the system is returning no tickets in Club Europe on some services. UPDATE: It was fixed sometime during the day on 9 March – thanks BA!

I figured it was just a random occurrence when I was searching for flights from Dublin to Amman recently. Apparently it’s not, as it is also happening on Dublin to Krakow.

Not Selling Club Europe? Not So Fast!

Everything looks fine when you do a flight search. Prices are displayed in both economy and business class, and you can select them quite normally.

You proceed through and select your return flight and it comes to the flight summary screen. Unusually, it lets you know that “This flight does not have business”. Checking the flight details at the earlier point in the bookings actually shows this. There is business class on Dublin to London, but not on London to Krakow. Since there is business class on every single BA flight, I figured it was just a once off and let it go. It seems to be a wider issue though!

Business Class Is Available Though

I always check things, and interestingly enough, the flight from London to Krakow does have Club Europe business class available. When I do the same search, but from London, I get this.

That looks like J is being sold quite happily out of London. It is not working when departing from any city outside of there, such as Dublin, Belfast City, and Edinburgh. Curious!

Overall Thoughts

There are two issues here. First, airlines want people to book and fly and yet this glitch is stopping me from making a booking and handing over cash. Second, if I purchased a business class ticket and somehow didn’t notice this, I would be very upset on flying day.

British Airways would be good to have a look at their IT right now and fix whatever it is making this happen. My only alternative in the interim would be to book separate flights on separate tickets, but who needs that noise? I know I don’t.

Have you noticed British Airways not selling business class on some services? What do you think, IT glitch, Brexit or the work experience kid is in revenue management this week? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by BriYYZ via Wikimedia Commons.