British Airways Adds New Verification Screen
I just logged into my British Airways Avios account to search for an award and noticed something very new. After entering in my account number and password, I was brought to a new verification screen. It says,“Sorry to interrupt you, we need to check you are a real person before you can continue.”
The screen then has one of those new picture captchas where you check a box signifying you are not a robot and you identify all of the pictures of pizza or road signs or whatever it asks. Hopefully this will not break automated award search tools. I did just run a search on Award Nexus and it seemed to work alright, so perhaps they are getting their data a different way.
I have been searching BA a lot this week and this new screen just appeared today, so it will take some time to see exactly what effect it has on everything. I have logged in to my account with different browsers and in private mode and have seen it every time. I am curious if everyone else is seeing it or if perhaps the verification is being rolled out more slowly.
Conclusion
This isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it makes searching BA award space more complicated and slows the process down even more than before. If you are having a different experience than me when logging into your account and trying to search for award space, let me know in the comments.
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Agree that the website needs improvement, but why would anyone complain about getting 100k bonus miles from Chase (instead of say 45k UR points)???? The 100k BA offer was one of the best ever around, and is still a great deal if you use it for things other than short-haul flights on AA.
Agreed. Their site stinks, but I will still take their points!
The BA website was already a pain before this. Random glitches for no apparent reason. And a bug that has continued for at least three years: when you start a search (at least from the US home page), the format is MMDDYY, but at some point the format changes, without notice, to DDMMYY, and even though you didn’t change anything the website reverses the month and date, telling you your intended date of say Jan 13 into Month = 13 and Date = 1, and giving an error message, or even worse if you intended to search for January 5 it will spit out results for May 1. Utterly aggravating, and made worse by the interminable holds for the call center. Kind of regret I went for the 100K chase offer, especially now that short-haul saver availability on US/AA is drying up.
I hate that bug. It always happens.
Call Singapore line instead, they are a joy to deal with, and speak the Queen’s English impeccably.
I’ve had this pop up for me a few months ago.
Saw it for the first time today as well.
Asked me about fish, and I found it fairly challenging as some images were obviously fish, but some more complicated dishes were a question mark… I passed though so I am guessing you don’t need to get a perfect score.
My guess is that its probably showing this only to blue members (as anyone can be a blue member). I’m a BA elite member, and I haven’t ever seen this.