Just called the Gold Line to book a Gold Priority Reward for a flight to Edinburgh for the festival in August (V-class already sold out for a Friday evening flight!)

I'm booking two tickets with Avios for the outbound flight so that my friend doesn't need to fork out the enormous cash price, but when I tried to make the booking the agent told me that he needed to have an account and be one of my family & friends?

I'm pretty sure that when you make an Avios booking online you can enter anyone's name, so what's the difference here? Is it because I'm on the phone, or because it's a GPR, or is she just wrong?

Any thoughts would be helpful, I don't want to go through the hassle of adding my friend as he's not a frequent flyer.

Thanks