British airways avios points flight availability success or failure??

djburr

I thought I would start this thread to see if people are having success at finding availability to use their British Airways Avios points on flights, availability on BA flights to use Avios seems to be a struggle, especially if you want Club World or First Class seats, how are you finding it, have you had success or not??

PeacefulWaters

The only guaranteed way to succeed is to make Avios purchases 355 days before the flight. First in gets the guaranteed seats.

If BA believes it can sell seats for cash they will be unlikely to open up anymore than two seats per class per flight.

What routes are you looking at?

The Reward Flight Finder tool is really handy.
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/executive-club/spending-avios/reward-availability

Other options might include opening an Iberia loyalty account, getting a credit for taking part in surveys there and, after 90 days, transferring some of your BA Avios to Iberia. This might identify additional redemption opportunities flying out of Madrid as a starting point. Lowe "taxes" on Iberia can make it worth an extra flight and hotel stay.

Voyager2002

If you are willing to spend some cash as well as Avios, there is generally good availability for booking with cash and upgrading with Avios. The cash fare has to be for Premium Economy if you want to end up in Business, but often the PE fares are only a couple of pounds higher than the economy ones.

Caz3121

the availability is not any different whether you are looking for a CW seat to book with miles or whether you are looking to upgrade a WT+ ticket
There are 2 CW redemption seats guaranteed on every BA flight (and 4 x Y but no guarantee of any WT+ or F) Best time to grab them is when they are released at around midnight T-355
there is an additional site that is useful as a guide baredemptionfinder.com although it has it's issues with live feeds it does give a fairly good indication and you can see that some of the popular routes are difficult...eg 1 seat F LON-LAX has 1 date in the next 11 months, 2 seats = no availability..still need to go to the BA site and check the live inventory
I do long haul ex-EU now, paying for business class and keep the avios for shorthaul RFS flights

dickydonkin

Persistence and flexibility is the key, although redemption availability to the US West coast and destinations such as Capetown can be very limited.

As Caz3121 alluded to, using Avios for Reward Flight Savers can reap good value (sometimes it works out a little cheaper by booking two single trips as opposed to a return), however, for us in the regions, although still good value, flying from London represents a better proposition.

I have just upgraded with Avios two existing revenue club world seats to First from LHR - JFK - which used up 40,000 Avios (no additional charges) and it does appear that there is plenty of redemption availability on that route for many dates. This was excellent value as the sector is part of a two city ex EU trip that was unbelievable value anyway!

A random date of availability is shown here.

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Be careful though when part paying with cash/Avios as sometimes the cash element varies very little despite using a significant chunk of Avios and remember too that some economy buckets do not qualify for upgrades, although some additional economy selling classes have recently been allowed to upgrade.

Just keep plodding away with 'dummy bookings' and hopefully nearer the date you wish to travel, something will become available. Good Luck.

Yolina

I normally don't have issues getting the RFS for the destinations/ dates/ flight times I want.

I've just booked today 2 RFS returns LCY/NCE (only 1 flight a day) - one for April and the other for September; last July I booked a RFS LCY/ZRH for February and managed to get the first flight out at 7am which gets busy quickly.

thebigbosh

Tend to be quite flexible with where we want to go and when. Last year we did Lon-MIA and NYC-Lon in first after booking only 2.5 months in advance.

This year we're doing Dominican Republic in business having booked 5 months in advance.

But would love to go to Cape Town next year in February and there's zero availability even a year (i.e. January next year) in advance. Grrrr

holidaysforme

I find I need to book flights for school holidays as soon as they open up,- so 11 months out.
I've had success doing this and have flights to Spain and Italy booked this year, both
Reward flight saver, where the taxes are capped at £35. One thing I've been doing is booking two one way flights as the taxes on the return flight are often lower, so you can save a few pounds.

PeacefulWaters

thebigbosh wrote: »

But would love to go to Cape Town next year in February and there's zero availability even a year (i.e. January next year) in advance. Grrrr

Iberia fly from Madrid to Johannesburg and have connecting Comair flights to Cape Town.

Open an Iberia account online. Register for the surveys to earn some extra Avios within your Iberia account. Wait 90 days (as you can't transfer points for this period). Assess Avios availability from Madrid on the Iberia site. If you can find what you want, transfer the points from BAEC to Iberia and book.

Random December dates I picked were 142,500 Avios plus £242 in taxes for business class. Taxes lower than BA by a long way.

I assume you can get to Madrid for another 9,000 plus £35 in cattle class.

djburr

I am delighted to say that I have now secured 2 First Class return flights for Christmas flying out to San Diego and then back from Vancouver in the first week of January, 185,000 Avios in total with BA Amex 2for1 voucher and only £550 tax per person, total steal I would say, cheapest cash tickets for these flights are showing at £7900 for 2 :-)

budgetflyer

If you use https://baredemptionfinder.com/ you can see a whole years availability at once