why oh why

[realthog]

This morning I've spent some considerable while tussling with both the Virgin Atlantic and British Airways sites (for price comparison) in order to book tickets for Pam and myself to go to the UK for Fantasycon in Nottingham in September, staying en route with friends in Reading. I'm now sitting here with sweat pouring off me, and this is before I've even had time to tackle my morning mayhem on the famous Heart-Healthy Exercise Machine (Doris).

Many of the reasons for the complication of the process are perfectly reasonable ones, but one of them -- which I recognize applies to relatively few people, but still must turn up fairly often -- leads me to want to bang a few fatcat executive heads against the wall.

I live in the US. As a UK citizen, I retain a UK bank account for occasional use -- as when traveling to the UK, duh. It would suit me, on this occasion, to pay our plane fares out of that UK account, which recently received some juicy royalties.

Both Virgin and BA seem never to have conceived such possibility, and have rendered it impossible to effect a transaction like this.

Two or three trips ago I phoned up Virgin Atlantic in a similar situation, and discovered that, even when dealing with human beings rather than a website, nothing could be done to let me pay out of my UK account. I asked if this were a matter of law. The very helpful lady at Virgin was pretty certain it wasn't. So I asked if she had any idea why this effective prohibition existed. She said she was as baffled as I was, and that I was far from the first person to ask her.

This morning, I discovered that British Airways split their booking site into two, one for US and one for UK customers. A cunning lightbulb lit up my study! I got all the way through the booking to the end, where I discovered that the site refused to believe that my UK bank account could have anything other than a UK billing address for me. I had to start all over again with the US section, which of course refused to accept payment from a UK bank account . . .

My, was I cheerful by this time. Pam joined the cats cowering under the spare bed. Having bought the tickets I then had to arrange for a transfer of funds to my US account from my UK one. Another fiddly procedure. There was snarling, and even oathery.

Oh, well . . .

The big surprise was that British Airways proved cheaper than Virgin Atlantic -- even after I'd volunteered to pay an extra 82 bucks or so as a contribution to a UN agency dedicated to reducing carbon emissions. Usually it's the other way round, and by quite a wide margin. The saving wasn't huge -- about $150 -- but, looked at another way, that's approaching 10%. While Virgin's in-flight service and general efficiency isn't bad, BA's -- at least the last time I flew with them -- is even better, so it really wasn't hard to make a choice.