British Airways starts charging for seat reservations

[PennyAgain]

$45 per bag for overweight is a lot of $$$. Many cruise passengers have a great deal of heavy luggage.

 

My husband and I do not because we never take more luggage than we can manage with no help at all.

[Globaliser]

$45 per bag for overweight is a lot of $$$.

You obviously haven't encountered many overweight bag fees, then.

 

Now, remember that this is long-haul flying that you're doing.

 

Say, for example, you're flying from London to Singapore on Singapore Airlines. You have a baggage allowance of 20 kg per person in economy.

 

Now, suppose you bring one bag that weighs 32 kg.

 

What's the overweight (excess baggage) charge? 12 kg x USD 50 per kg = USD 600.

 

One way.

 

That's why USD 45 per bag for a bag betwen 23 kg and 32 kg is a bargain.

[dual]

But if you booked back in March 2009, your tickets should have been issued by now, anyway. Have they?

 

Nope, booked via a TA, nothing arrived as yet

[Globaliser]

Nope, booked via a TA, nothing arrived as yet

Have you got a British Airways booking reference, one that will work the BA website's Manage My Booking function?

 

If so, go to http://www.checkmytrip.com and use that booking reference to call up your reservation. If tickets have been issued, the ticket numbers will almost certainly show up in the relevant part of that page. You're looking for a 13-digit number starting with the digits 125.

 

You can also try to get this from the BA website. If you pull up your booking, and then click on the link to view your e-ticket receipt, then you should see something that's got your ticket numbers if your tickets have been issued already. But the BA website isn't always reliable at delivering an e-ticket receipt, which is why the checkmytrip site is better because all you actually need to see is ticket numbers to show that your tickets have been issued.

 

If you've tried both of these and you can't see ticket numbers, ask your TA when the tickets will be issued. Stress the importance of getting them issued before 7 October 2009, if you're concerned about the baggage fees.

 

Many TAs don't want to issue tickets until the very last minute, because that's the point at which they have to hand over your money to the airline. (If they've already taken the money off you, they'd prefer to sit on it or use it in the interim.) So you may have to apply some pressure.

 

The downside of doing this is that once the ticket's been issued, you are irrevocably locked in to the airline's change/cancellation etc penalties, which bite from the moment of ticket issue. Before that, you usually only have to deal with your TA's T&C of business, which may be more generous to you than the airline would be.

 

Finally, don't forget that you're almost certainly dealing with e-tickets, so in truth no ticket will ever arrive. Any bit of paper is only evidence that an e-ticket has been issued. The ticket itself is never in tangible form - it's purely electronic. So if your ticket has been issued, this may explain why you still haven't received anything - it may just be your TA wanting to defer sending you bits of paper until closer to your trip, so that you don't mislay them or lose them.