You would think that the BA “Extension-Gate” saga would not become even weirder, but here we are.

British Airways issued a statement to the Financial Times late Friday about the status extension that they rolled out to members and emailed them about midweek. Many Club members had their memberships renewed with little or no flight activity credited to the program.

Our BA Tier Extension Coverage:

British Airways “Extension-Gate” Chaos & Outrage Continues: Members With No Flights Renewed While Those With Significant Activity Not

British Airways Renewing The Club Members Without Meeting Official Criteria

The airline issued the following statement to the Financial Times:

But then:

So, they had to do a “forensic” investigation (CSI Waterside, anyone?) to figure out that they had potentially renewed up to 130,000 members without those members meeting the official or intended criteria.

The IAG Loyalty blames a “technical issue” for this cockup that cannot be correct. Technology itself doesn’t do anything unless you have programmed it to do so.

You would think they would test their systems to see what the outcome is and how many would be renewed under specific criteria.

Conclusion

IT and software don’t make mistakes, but humans who program these do.

How on earth, when they came up with a renewal script to extend the tiers for members who have not met the official criteria, did they end up renewing up to 1% of their The Club members (130K)?

How did someone not look at the file to see how many extensions would be done and do some manual checks to ensure everything is in order before letting it run wild on the entire membership data?

This is just another case where BA’s and IAG’s IT systems have failed miserably.

A few years ago, I collected $2K as part of a class action lawsuit settlement when BA had malware on its website that collected the credit card numbers of those buying directly from the airline, which then were used for unauthorized purchases elsewhere, including mine.

There are never-ending website and app issues with BA, and their systems frequently crash entirely, leaving all passengers stranded.

Why don’t they blow up their entire IT department and bring some competent people to run it?

Source