19 do BA in Y
I hope this may offer something of a difference – not only are the flights in WT but there are 19 of us travelling in a group!
Introduction
I have very few opportunities to travel for work – 8 flights in total over 17 years. So last year, using a specialist group tour operator, I booked to take a group of students to New York. We had a great time but it was somewhat expensive, with the tour operator taking a hefty slice despite not actually doing a great deal. This year to reduce costs I decided to forego the specialist and to book everything myself. And who else would I turn to but BA – well it would give me some TPs and extra avios. There has to be something of a perk for anybody prepared to take a group of teenagers abroad.
The Booking Process
I began by pricing up a group booking for flights. These were fairly reasonable compared to the same flights individually. There would be advantages to this such as not needing to provide names until closer to departure date. Ideal if your group is not confirmed. However, I was keen to make this into a package, but BA do not do packages for groups of 10 or more. Given that there were some cracking BA Holiday deals at the time, I went for this, securing the flights and accommodation (Hilton New York Fashion District) whilst saving abour £250 per person from the previous year. A package was also a decent saving on the flight only price.
Booking via the gold line was relatively painless. I worked it through with the agent and provided all the details as he priced it up across three separate PNRs. This is where I made my first error. I put myself in the last group of only 3 passengers. This was the cheapest booking and may mean less avios for a BA Holiday booking. Ideally I would have done this online but didn’t know if the booking would stick at the same price whilst completing each separate booking. I think in future I would do this and just accept I may need to call and cancel if the prices were to shoot up during the process.
Following booking, I did notice an error on one of the names which BA quickly corrected. We then had a member of the group withdraw. This was a bit of a problem as they were the lead name on one of the hotel rooms. The only way around this was to cancel the room and rebook which was a cost of over £400. This was error number 2. If I’d paid slightly more at the time of booking the accommodation would have been flexible and I could have made this change for free. Although saying that, the cost of the increased flexibility would have been about £400 in any case.
Seat Allocation
The only problem I have had in the whole process is in getting seats allocated. As a gold card holder I am allowed to request seats for all members of my group when travelling in the same cabin. This perk saved the group around £1500 if we decided to pay for this – which we wouldn’t have done. However, the allocation of seats never matched what I wanted/requested and required numerous calls as each time they had to go off to be processed. They often moved some seats but not others. Eventually I made do with more of less something that allowed the group to be mainly together on the long haul with the intention of making some changes later at OLCI.
A t-24 I was online and completed check in, holding back from printing boarding passes so I could adjust seats where possible. Availability on the domestic and throughout the Y cabin was good so this was useful when I got the hang of not trying to just swap one person for another – not so easy when doing this on three separate devices at once due to having three separate PNRs.
The prospect of it all going wrong…
As I write this, I really should be getting some much needed sleep. However, it eludes me. The forecast for LHR is looking windy throughout the day and although there are no cancellation showing at the moment, that could all change come the morning – and the first to be hit when cancellation are needed are the domestic flights. Never mind, we are leaving for the airport at 4am, and expect to arrive at MAN around 6am, despite a full closure planned on the M6. We don’t depart until 9:55am so have plenty of time! If we are lucky they may even get us on an earlier flight it ours does get panned.