ttj - Tom Jones

 Bought ticker on BA web site.  Every time I try to check in online, I get this page: " We are experiencing high demand on ba.com at the moment".  The text doesn't indicate whether it's just going to take a long time to load, or whether it's just not going to work.  But from the fact it's a static page, and no re-loading is going on, this is a dead end.  That's it.  A major airline in 2026.  This is what happens when you try to check in:

What is worse than an airline unable to sell tickets?  An airline which sells tickets, and then makes it impossible to use them. In this case, the "passenger information", which for some reason has to be entered from scratch every time, has drop-down lists in its form that do nothing when clicked on, in firefox in Debian 12. The web is much, much worse than it was 25 years ago.  Then, drop-down lists simply worked, and nobody thought to break them.

There aren't many things an airline's web site has to do.  Selling tickets is top, followed by online checkin.  Perhaps also to issue shrill demands about "advanced passenger information", and force known passengers to repeatedly type in the same details about themselves.   Here is a case of easyjet failing to do online checkin.  Notice the lack of any attempt to get the specific reason for the error to the customer.  A web lackey has been tasked with listing a few reasons why checkin might fail, and then whatever error, perhaps generic, perhaps more specific, is "handled" with this message. Imagine ordering food in a restaurant, and the waiter says "sorry, we can't take your order because the chef is on strike, or we don't have the ingredients for what you've ordered, or you do not meet the dress code for this restaurant, or the table you occupy is reserved, or we are dealing with a vermin problem in our food stores, or perhaps for a differ...