Gertieprickles

4 hours ago, coco88 said:

We have become increasingly concerned in our interactions with the land office of Silversea 

We have always found that the 'land office' of Silversea lets the company down badly. They are in no-way a reflection of what you would expect onboard. Please don't let the admin side of things put you off enjoying the onboard Silversea experience.

With respect to your next trip, the best thing you can do is use the BA contact details and ask them and if it is positive keep a copy for your trip.

 

Jeff

Sounds good to me. Thanks

Hi Marie, the simple answer is that the fare bucket ie price paid is irrelevant to benefits except on BA staff travel. It is that simple.

 

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

All this coding is new to me - like I said we weren't even aware there was such a thing. When we get our business flight tickets from SS, will we be allowed to use the lounges on the domestic and short haul parts of the flight.

Marie

Marie, what did it say on your receipt? Surely that would tell you, but if not, a call to SS to ask them to add the second batch of incentives. I hear what you say about giving incentives but actually increasing the price so really, you're no better off. The SS agent I spoke to even admitted they do that.... but on mine all was good. Did you not call? I'm not sure that Agents or SS are going to do anything unless you tell them. Maybe worth asking if they added the deal and if they didnt, why not. Nothing to lose.

Thanks for that.

Part of the problem is we don't seem to have the same SS agent for very long as they keep leaving so we never know who we're dealing with.

For a few years we have the lovely Rea and we built up a really good friendly relationship. However she left, then we got Dan. He left so we got another one, who also left.

As you say I've got nothing to loose so come Monday I'll give them a ring.

Marie

That is just the reason to have good TA. They can fight your battles. Your agent does not have to be local. With phone, fax and e-mail you may never meet them. Ask your friends, Google travel associations, consortiums etc. I do not believe I can name anyone particular on this thread but look through the topics/opinions threads and you may find just what you need! Good luck.[emoji4]

Thanks for the advice, it's certainly worth thinking about.

I suppose the 'fear' of TA stems back to past experiences years ago with local TA's. In our area they had a reputation of being money grabbing so there was a lot of distrust. Then when we did try and over come our fear and use one, we found nothing had changed. It does then you make you very weary.

Marie

This happens. I've reread your note.. It sounds like you were wanting to use the arrivals lounge at Heathrow, not the departure lounge at Rome. It appears that it isn't anything to do with the price, rather it is only a benefit of Club World ie long haul.

 

http://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/lounges/arrivals-lounges

 

It sounds like there was simply a misunderstanding about the reason. BA wouldn't be able to cope with the volume of business travellers using lounges at both end of their European trips.

 

Jeff

We were about to take a domestic flight home to Newcastle. Previously, on the 'J' coded tickets there has never been any problem with accessing the business lounges, even on the domestic flights.

My query though is the actual I coding (we didn't even know there were any coding system). We were under the impression that we had full business class tickets (ie use of the lounges).

As SS were buying the tickets on our behalf we weren't made aware that what we were getting wasn't full business class - hope that makes sense...

Marie

I was only answering your question. Lounge access is an advertised benefit for passengers holding a Business Class ticket.

I appreciate that you were only answering my question. However BA doesn't agree with your answer.

Try telling that to BA...

Back in November we were returning home from a Rome to Barcelona cruise. As we were flying business class we were able to use BA's business class lounges. We were looking forward to a large glass of wine at Heathrow's Terminal 5 lounge as we'd had an horrendous time at the hands of BA both on the ground at Barcelona and by the cabin crew on the flight (disability discrimination.....).

However when we got to BA's business lounge we were refused entry because our flight tickets had an 'I' code on them. We were told even though we travelled business class there and back we should have never been allowed into any of their business class lounges.

As I still had the pdf's of some of the previous flight details that SS had arranged for us, I checked, and with the exception of this one, they all had the code 'J'.

I queried this with SS as they booked the flights and they said as far as they were concerned it was a BA fault so I should contact them.

I did and was told that there are several codes used by BA to indicate various purchase levels of business class tickets. 'J' code means full-fare business class purchase, 'D' code is lightly discounted and 'I' is heavily discounted. Our November cruise flight tickets were 'I' code, so whilst we travelled business class on the aircraft, we were not entitled to use the business class lounges because the flight tickets had been purchased at a severely reduced rate. It's basically a cut-down version of business class.

Just before Christmas I emailed back SS and explained that BA had said. They're going to look into this but as yet I haven't heard anything from them.

I'm curious to find out if this ever happen to anyone else who has had their flights arranged by SS.

Given that we paid in full to fly business class tickets for our forthcoming May cruise I'm curious to see what code SS give us this time...

Marie

I don't post that often - am more of a lurker, so be gentle with me :)

We booked our May 17 Med cruise last June direct with SS. TA are thin on the ground where I live. We've used one before and that was rip-off so vowed never to use them again.

Anyway.... we booked two cruises at the same time. The first one we got £69 business class flights, $1.5k obc, Venetian discount and 10% discount if paid in full by the end of June. The second cruise we only got the 10% paid in full discount.

A couple of months later I noticed on SS website that they were now offering our second cruise with free business class flights (we had to pay for ours), OBC and the 10% paid in full discount which had been extended to I think November.

I didn't really look that closely into it so I don't know if SS had increased the cost of the cruise etc to compensate for the discounts. It maybe that the two cruises would have come out at exactly the same amount.

Marie