BA Gold? Book £1 Avios sale tickets for all of 2014

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• where2travel says:

  14 Jan14 January 07:11

  I suppose we can only speculate but is it possible we will still be able to make date changes to these tickets for free after the sale has finished or will BA ask for the additional “taxes”, i.e. £34 for a return trip that will apply at that time?

  • Raffles says:

    14 Jan14 January 07:32

    Taxes should reprice – that is what normally happens when, say, fuel surcharges have increased or you upgrade yourself one class.

• Will says:

  14 Jan14 January 07:42

  If a non gold did this would it be a crude way of paying £26 rather than £35? Doesn’t seem worth it, more curious. Nice find. Golds have good options on the sale

  • squills says:

    14 Jan14 January 07:54

    Good point. Intuitively that looks about right.

  • Dave y says:

    14 Jan14 January 08:07

    Arnt amendments £25 per booking. If correct then worthwhile for non gold if you have multiple travelers!

    • squills says:

      14 Jan14 January 08:32

      Is it per booking or per passenger?

      I still have to book Xmas return trip for 5 for 1st week January, I could save a few quid 😉

      (17.50 x 5) – £5 -£25 = ?

      • Andrew says:

        14 Jan14 January 09:00

        It’s per passenger unfortunately.

        I’ve just checked for a £1 booking I made yesterday, and it’s showing up as £50 to change (so £26 compared to £35 usually).

        • squills says:

          14 Jan14 January 09:03

          Oh thanks 😉

          At least I know now. Would have worked with returns @ £35 RFS/ person but I just need the second leg home now.

      • Rob says:

        14 Jan14 January 09:54

        Per passenger.

        Why not book an extra seat for a BA Gold?! You can then change the entire booking for free, for all passengers, as well as select seats for free. And you could do online check-in for the Gold to get yourself an empty middle seat as well!

• Mark B says:

  14 Jan14 January 08:09

  Out of interest would you have been able to cancel online already Raffles ?

  • Rob says:

    14 Jan14 January 08:27

    I get “we are unable to process a cancellation online”. However, this is relatively normal with BA – once you’ve changed a booking, online cancellation is normally closed off.

    I see that BA is offering me a Club Europe upgrade for £56 on my one-way to Dublin in September!

    • Mark B says:

      14 Jan14 January 08:40

      Yes but but on this occasion it’s closed off at the outset for normal cancellations, i’m hoping this is normal (first time I’ve booked online) and the cancellation option will appear after the 24 hour cooling off period, meaning no charge as opposed to £25 for ringing up

    • Susan says:

      14 Jan14 January 08:52

      I’m impressed that BA thinks CE is really worth a £1 extra a minute to someone who’s already Avios-rich and has BA Gold.

      • Rob says:

        14 Jan14 January 09:52

        I did pay £59 last year to upgrade my parents in law on an Avios ticket I booked, but a) they didn’t have lounge access already, b) they are getting on a bit and the space and relative calm of CE is better for them and c) it was from Hamburg, so a bit further than Dublin.

      • Mark B says:

        14 Jan14 January 12:35

        These being Avois (just called) have you (or anyone else) got a STD number for BA ?

        • squills says:

          14 Jan14 January 12:55

          if you call this number from a UK number, an automatic message tells you that you have to dial the 0844 number, SO DIAL 141 beforehand and you will get through: 0191 490 7900
          Also: 0191 490 7901 /02 /05 /06 & higher

        • Callum says:

          14 Jan14 January 18:26

          I managed to get through on my mobile by changing a setting to hide my number to outgoing calls.

          Seems a bit unfair – I could very plausibly be calling from abroad using my UK number!

    • Jon says:

      14 Jan14 January 09:05

      A great shame there is no tier point benefit for cash upgrades on avios tickets!

      • Rob says:

        14 Jan14 January 09:50

        I know. Even I wouldn’t bother with that, given I already have lounge access.

• Andrew says:

  14 Jan14 January 09:23

  Am I correct in assuming that the £1 bookings will not incur a further charge to cancel on-line – ie would only cost me the £1 I’ve already spent to cancel and get my Avios back?

  • squills says:

    14 Jan14 January 09:26

    That is certainly HFP thinking if you look back. I think it has been demonstrated as well.

  • Rob says:

    14 Jan14 January 09:49

    All I can say is that I know for a fact that cancelling, say, a Boston to New York (£1.60 tax) does not require the payment of further taxes, and all the Avios come back. You should be fine.

    • Mark says:

      14 Jan14 January 10:59

      Yes, I can also confirm that if you have paid part cash, part Avios all of the cash part is refunded even if the taxes & fees were less than £25.

      e.g. if you paid £10 taxes & fees on an AA redemption plus £30 cash to reduce the number of Avios required, you would get £30 plus the Avios back on cancellation and forfeit only the £10 taxes & fees charge.

  • Andrew says:

    14 Jan14 January 10:28

    And can cancel for free within 24 hours by calling…

• KARFA says:

  14 Jan14 January 09:44

  Thanks, I didn’t think of this until you suggested it. Had a LHR-LBA leg left on my RFS £1 booking which I wasn’t going to need by the end of May, but have now changed and can use it for coming back from London for a trip in July.

  • Callum says:

    14 Jan14 January 18:33

    I did that this morning as well – though I’ve now had a missed call from British Airways. Hopefully they haven’t noticed and want to change it! (Though Manage my booking is still showing the new flight I changed it to)

• BillyBleach says:

  14 Jan14 January 09:46

  One point to note that may be missed by some is although booking the flight via ba.com is preferential. For hotel avios bookings, avios.com is cheaper for the same hotel.

  I booked a flight for the wife and I to Nice, whilst looking for avios hotel bookings I noticed that in all instances the hotel avios rate was lower on avios.com than via ba.com.

  The Nice trip is a three night stay, I probably will try and stay one night in Monte Carlo (just up the road).

• Frenske says:

  14 Jan14 January 10:04

  … and the rich are getting richer. Probably most BA gold members are on a reasonable high salary already so £16.50 would mean peanuts to them. However I cannot blame BA (and basically all commercial companies) for rewarding loyalty.

• Richargr001 says:

  14 Jan14 January 10:11

  Hi Raffles,

  I just want to say a big thank you for putting all these posts up -they are a great read and really useful.

  I do have a quick question about redeeming avios on BA. You mention on the ‘read this first’ page of the website that “when redeeming Avios on BA, you can claim a totally free domestic flight to use weeks or months later”. Is this still true. If so how do I go about doing it?

  Thanks again for all your good work!

  • Rob says:

    14 Jan14 January 10:25

    You can add a domestic connection to any Reward Flight Saver for no extra cost.

    Let’s say you are flying Nice to London. Instead, book Nice to London (three month stopover) to Manchester. The cost for both is identical, but you get a London to Manchester flight for nothing to use later in the year.

    If you need to change the date of the London-Manchester, you can do so even after you’ve already flown the London-Nice leg – although you will pay the £25 change fee unless you are BA Gold.

    (You need to book on ba.com to be able to do stopovers, avios.com cannot handle it.)

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