British Airways launches extra flights to Cape Town, St Lucia and Cancun

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By an amazing coincidence, one day after Virgin Atlantic announced its new route to Cape Town, British Airways has announced an extra Cape Town service.

There will be an additional two flights per week from London Gatwick to Cape Town, starting on 10th January.

This takes the number of weekly British Airways flights from London to Cape Town to 19, on top of the 14 BA flights to Johannesburg and the three weekly services to Durban.

British Airways launches additional Cape Town flight from Gatwick

This is not necessarily overkill, because Cape Town was a route also served by Thomas Cook before its demise. It is possible that both BA and Virgin can make a success of their flights, although the lack of full fare Business Class traffic – as opposed to leisure travellers in flat beds on £1,750 sale deals – may prove to be an issue.

British Airways also announced two other frequency increases yesterday:

St Lucia gains an additional flight on Wednesday and Saturday. No dates were given, but the implication is that the service will simply continue to operate nine times per week when the Summer timetable ends in October, rather than dropping down to seven as it does usually.

Cancun gains an additional weekly service, on Sundays, from 6th December. This will take the number of weekly flights up to six.

Both of these routes operate from London Gatwick.

It isn’t clear where the aircraft are coming from to operate these new services. BA has some flexibility due to the arrival of additional A350 and Boeing 777 aircraft and the ability to flex the retirement of the Boeing 747 and older Boeing 777 fleet.

PS. If you missed it, take a look at our recent article on the top 10 reasons why I think you should get a British Airways Premium Plus American Express credit card.

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Category

British Airways and Avios

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Clive Roylance says:

14 Feb14 February 07:51

On the extra flights to St Lucia anyone know if there will be the new Club Suites?
- Roberto says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:19
  
  Gatwick flights dont have suites..
- Rhys says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:19
  
  Unlikely given it’s the Gatwick fleet
Grant says:

14 Feb14 February 07:56

OT – Marriott Bonus

The additional 50% bonus points have finally landed in both mine and my wife’s accounts following our transfers during the pre-Christmas offer. It took a few calls to Marriott to get it sorted but there never seemed to be any question over whether we were eligible for the bonus.

Neither of us received the email about the offer at the time.
- Munch says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 15:05
  
  Is there no point in contacting Amex? Do I just need to go straight to Marriott? What date did you complete the Amex transfers?
  - Grant says:
    
    14 Feb14 February 15:11
    
    Transfers were done on / around 10th November. Amex will tell you that Marriott are responsible for providing the 50% bonus on the transfer so they can’t do anything. If you call Marriott CS ask them to raise a ticket so the back office staff can look at it. They are slow but eventually your points should be deposited.
- Harry T says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 16:15
  
  @Grant
  Excellent news, thank you. I will ask Marriott.
AndyGWP says:

14 Feb14 February 08:04

OT – Anyone know why there is currently a block redeeming miles for Virgin Atlantic LHR-HAV flights? Here’s what they sent me:
“We are currently unable to use miles to purhase upgrade flights to and from Havana. This is a system restriction on our side”

No joy checking Vflyer and Flyertalk to see if this is temporary, or when it might start to work. Seatspy doesnt have it as a route option either so I can’t set an alert (aware the route doesnt shift from Gatwick until early summer though).
- Andrew says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:55
  
  Someone’s noticed that a US Citizen can earn Virgin points?
  
  Points hosted on US servers?
- paulm says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 09:06
  
  I think there has been a lot of restrictions to do with tickets to Havana since they started using the same system as delta a few years back
  - memesweeper says:
    
    14 Feb14 February 11:54
    
    Correct. I have no idea what the back-end hack is that makes it possible to keep flying to Havana, as the front-end IT basically can’t deal with it at all…
    - AndyGWP says:
      
      14 Feb14 February 14:49
      
      Never even contemplated that! Thanks both.
      
      I’ll won’t get my hopes up, but will have a go at the airport 🙂
    - AndyGWP says:
      
      14 Feb14 February 14:49
      
      (wanted to upgrade a cash ticket)
- Andy_CF says:
  
  25 Feb25 February 12:04
  
  They’ve just changed the operating aircraft and operating days for the LHR-HAV flights in the last day or so, so that might be why they were restricting reward redemption?? Aircraft change from A330 to 787, and the saturday service (VS147) has just been changed to a Sunday (at least from november 2020 anyway).
CaptainAnonymous says:

14 Feb14 February 08:07

My Amex gold offer: Spend £800 get 400 points. Excuse me while I contain my uncontrollable excitement.
- TGLoyalty says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:45
  
  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth
Nigel says:

14 Feb14 February 08:19

For me the Amex offer was spend £1,600 to get 1,500 points.
- Rhys says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:28
  
  Far more reasonable!
- Tom says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 09:28
  
  Spend £6,100 to get 1,500 points for me! Crazy!
- Kathy says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 10:07
  
  I got spend £3600 to get 1500 points – which isn’t going to happen.
  
  Now, I have had a couple of unusually-high spend months recently because I bought my annual train ticket, a new computer, and then booked a couple of flights for my holiday in September – but given that the only time I hit more than £3k in a month is when I bought the annual train ticket, and otherwise my spend per month hovers around the £500 to £600 mark, they’ve got to be having a laugh.
Benilyn says:

14 Feb14 February 08:22

To add, will that HSBC account give me an IBAN. I am trying to send money from US to this account.
- Rob says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:46
  
  I have a HSBC Euro account, opened here, and it’s been fine. No interest but does the job.
  - The Original David says:
    
    14 Feb14 February 09:18
    
    HSBC shafts you on the exchange rate though. I had one, tried it for a few transactions and was losing something stupid like 5% per conversion. Back to Revolut for me…
    - Alex M says:
      
      14 Feb14 February 09:21
      
      Were you able to wire transfer USD from US to revolut? If so – could you pls share how – I tried to send money after selling US shares but Fidelity insisted the account should be in my name (not the case with revolut, where it is in their name)?
    - Benilyn says:
      
      14 Feb14 February 09:43
      
      @Alex M – I use Fidelity Net Benefits. I transferred to my Revolut USd acct no issues, takes a week or two to verify the account, then I did a test $10 transfer and it worked fine. I just put in my IBAN and SWIFT.
      
      @The Original David: By that do you mean, if I have USD in my HSBC USD Account, when I want to move it to GBP, they give you a rubbish rate? On their website it says “Live exchange rates
      With live rates updated by the second during market hours, we’ll provide you with our most up-to-date foreign exchange rate available when sending money.” – this does not necessarily say spot rates, so I could get hammered. I can’t find an online link to the published rates, but trying to send money from my GBP current account to USD, it is showing a rate of 1.2543 vs 1.3031 spot, meaning 3.75%! That is mad…. urgh… I am just scared to put in so much into Revolut in case they block account.
    - the_real_a says:
      
      14 Feb14 February 12:44
      
      Yes – i transfer from a UK held HSBC account (USD) to Revolut in USD using the IBAN. I think £6 fee.
Pat says:

14 Feb14 February 08:27

I got the 1500Mr point bonus offer on £1600 spend on my Plt
Andy says:

14 Feb14 February 08:28

Hi,

I made the rookie error of opening a Virgin Atlantic credit card back in July and doing all my spending on it a while back – assuming that either a flying club account would be opened automatically or the points would be stored until I withdrew them into an account. Having finally bothered to check yesterday I realised there’s no points balance, no mention of having qualified for the sign up bonus and no flying club associated with the account.

Are all of the points ‘earned’ gone for good at this point
- MattB says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 08:39
  
  What did they say when you called them?
  - jc says:
    
    14 Feb14 February 11:36
    
    👏
- Aliks says:
  
  14 Feb14 February 10:01
  
  I think they auto-create a Flying Club account if you don’t already have one. Call them and ask where the points went to. They should be helpful.