Head for Points, the UK’s largest frequent flyer website, published a hands-on review on 6 July 2026 after testing the app on real British Airways (BA) flights that week. The outlet found no announcement or press release accompanied the launch. Anyone with automatic updates enabled simply woke up to a new interface on their phone.
The rollout matters because British Airways first promised the app in March 2024 as part of a wider £7 billion transformation programme. Passengers have spent two years complaining about the old app’s reliability, and the airline’s home hub, London Heathrow Airport (LHR), sees more BA departures than any other airport in the world. A shaky relaunch affects a large share of the carrier’s daily traffic.
How British Airways Rolled Out the App Without An Announcement
British Airways pushed the new build as a direct update to the existing app rather than as a separate download. This differs from the approach Virgin Atlantic (VS) took with its own recent app overhaul, where the airline offered the new version alongside the old one before retiring the original. Passengers can check which version they have by looking for “Version 7” in their app store listing.
Because BA folded the update into the existing listing, there was no way to trial the new app in parallel with the old one. Users who want to opt out must disable app updates entirely.
What The New App Gets Right
The strongest part of the new app is its flight booking flow. The new booking tool is “very fast” and said users can move forward and backward through the process with ease. The airline’s own App Store listing echoes this, stating that customers can compare prices using a new calendar view and pay using Apple Pay, saved cards, or a part-payment in Avios.
That improvement does not extend to reward bookings. Avios redemptions are not available on the main booking page at all. Instead, users must open a separate menu and select “Reward flights,” which then opens the request inside an internet browser rather than the app itself.
What Still Frustrates Users
Several basic gaps have drawn criticism since launch. Head for Points said the app fails to display flight timings and flight numbers on the main booking screen, even though passengers would expect to find that information there first. Bigger buttons are instead reserved for passenger details, baggage allowance, and frequent flyer information.
Account management carries similar problems. A user’s membership number appears in a smaller font than their Avios balance, and tier progress is not shown natively within the app, instead diverting to the ba.com website. Reaching the digital membership card, useful for scanning at lounges or priority queues, requires several taps, and even then the card cannot be added to Apple Wallet.
The app also has a basic technical bug around phone numbers. Users are asked to enter their country code and phone number in separate fields, but if an iPhone’s autocomplete fills the number field with the country code included, as it often does, the app cannot recognise and strip it out. It instead throws an error that the number is invalid.
Common complaints raised across reviews of the new build include:
- No flight number or timing shown on the main booking overview screen
- Avios reward bookings redirect to a browser rather than staying in-app
- No support for live Apple Wallet boarding pass activities on the lock screen
- Membership card cannot be saved to Apple Wallet
- Country code field cannot handle autocomplete-filled phone numbers
- Club statement transactions load only two entries per page
Notification coverage is also limited for now. Apple’s App Store listing for the app confirms that live activity notifications for gate changes currently work only for flights departing London Heathrow and London Gatwick airports, leaving passengers at BA’s other bases without the feature at launch.
How The Relaunch Fits British Airways’ £7 Billion Transformation Plan
British Airways first announced plans for a new app and website at its “In the Skies” showcase event in London in March 2024. Chairman and chief executive Sean Doyle framed the wider investment at the time as part of an effort to deliver a “world class customer experience,” telling attendees that “we’re on a journey to a better BA for our people and for our customers.”
The digital overhaul was one strand of a much larger commitment. British Airways confirmed it would spend £750 million on IT infrastructure, moving 700 systems and thousands of servers to the cloud, alongside £100 million earmarked for machine learning and automation across bookings and baggage handling. The new app and a redesigned ba.com website were meant to let passengers manage more of their journey without calling customer service.
The timeline slipped repeatedly after that announcement. By November 2025, British Airways confirmed the app would not arrive until 2026, with the existing app’s Google Play Store rating sitting at 1.3 out of 5 from more than 53,000 reviews at the time. That delay pushed the eventual launch to mid-June 2026, over two years after the original unveiling.
How British Airways’ App Launch Compares with Rivals
British Airways is not the only legacy carrier to have struggled with app modernization, but the comparison with peers has not been favorable so far. Virgin Atlantic released its new app as a standalone download, letting customers choose when to switch, an approach some passengers say worked more smoothly even though the new Virgin Atlantic app has drawn its own share of mixed reviews.
Lufthansa (LH) has set a different bar for functional design. Lufthansa’s app sends a text message on landing telling passengers how many minutes’ walk it is to their connecting gate, a level of information flow that BA’s new release does not match. United Airlines is widely cited across the industry as having one of the best airline apps in the world, a comparison Head for Points raised directly when assessing whether BA had closed the gap with competitors.
The common thread across these comparisons is that a new interface alone does not guarantee a better experience if the underlying account and notification systems remain unchanged. British Airways’ own listing promises “more features coming soon,” language that suggests the airline knows the June 2026 release is an incomplete first step rather than a finished product.
What Comes Next for the App
British Airways has not published a public roadmap for closing the app’s remaining gaps. The airline is currently recruiting for a Senior Product Owner to oversee both the web and app teams, according to a listing on its careers site, a role focused on managing the “offshore teams” that develop the platforms.
For now, passengers flying British Airways should expect the new app to handle new bookings well but to fall back on the browser or phone-based check-in for reward flights and account management tasks. The airline’s own messaging suggests further updates are planned, though it has not given a timeline for when features such as Apple Wallet membership cards or fuller notification coverage might arrive.