Originally Posted by
tony flynn
I booked through the British Airways website because Avis are the approved car hire partner and thus I pick up miles on the booking.
There is no need to use the horrid BA-specific Avis site to do bookings to get BA miles on Avis rentals. I've been doing Avis Preferred for years directly on the Avis site, with BA miles earned flawlessly as long as I entered my BA FF number and used AWD N7441000 (or one fewer 0's? I dunno, I thought there were only 3 0's at end, but I just logged in and the saved AWD I have has 4 0's at the end). I don't know if that AWD is necessary any longer (it's no longer mentioned at the BA site), or if it's appled automatically when you use the avisba site. (Back when you had to use the AWD, there was a different one for each BA status level. My AWD is for Blue.)
As of a couple years ago, there was a lot of FT discussion about not getting BA miles if you used some other corporate AWD. But taht was before BA stopped saying you had to use specific AWDs on their site. So I don't really know for sure whether any AWDs work now or only certain kinds.
The elite level specfic AWDs were back when you only earned a fixed number of miles. Nowadays you earn a vairable number of miles with a minimum number of miles. My day-or-two rentals used to always post as 500 miles, but since this spring they're all posting as 501 miles!
I've not had any problems with Avis not recognizing me as Preferred (having me on the board or at least behind the Preferred desk) when I've done this. But in the one case where I had done a booking differently (not through BA site, but not through the Avis site either) and tried to add my preferred number, I had problems. So I bet that the way you're adding the preferred number afterwards is the issue.
The issue of the dreaded "Town Car", that may be separate. Preferred works great for me because in most cases I don't mind a Compact, and I can reserve an Economy for a bit less and pretty much always get upgraded to a Compact or even next level up. But based on many reports here on FT, upgrades don't work as reliably from some car classes as others, depending on which car classes they tend to have lots vs few inventory of.