Originally Posted by
saltytheseagull
It's been a while since I've booked QR awards. I'm trying to book something in March but cannot find J availability from anywhere to/from the US even looking on a Monday. I'm hoping they dump some inventory, but I don't see that happening.
Is there any easier way to search other than punching in everything in BA website for each city pair?
Have you checked every day of the week, or only weekend days? There're been multiple times in the past where they've only released J availability to/from the US for Mon-Thu departures, never for Fri-Sun departures.
If you use Award Nexus (
www.award.nexus, click "more signup options" under the green Purchase button to sign up for free as a FlyerTalk member), it'll remember
all the searches you did in the past and let you repeat or edit them. A search using a particular engine (BA and/or QF) for a particular travel day in a particular class on a particular route typically uses 1 point. as a FlyerTalk member, you get I think 200 points to start, and can reload 100 points for free every 90 days (once you use them up), or you can buy more points if you like. IMHO it's a
way nicer user interface for repeating multiple searches than the BA website.
Also, BA sometimes doesn't show OW availability that QF does. For example, I just checked LAX-LIM (for a particular date) using both BA and QF (at AwardNexus), and both BA and QF found the nonstop LATAM route (which I booked and is now gone), but only QF (not BA) shows the AA-LA connection in MEX (which is not 100% J).
And I remember other reasons (with other searches in the past giving better results with QF than BA) why I made QF my preference over BA at Award Nexus.