Originally Posted by
Fossiebear
The final answer i received was that backtracking was not permitted. I wasn’t comfortable with this and spent a lot of time looking at potential multicarrier bookings through ba.com (ie round trip avios bookings with 2 non BA oneworld partners). Interestingly whilst many itineraries with backtracking could be selected they could not be priced online, whilst those without backtracking could be priced online, reflecting the appropriate application of the multicarrier pricing table.
Based on those findings I gave up on my original more aggressive itinerary.
Fair point - I had not twigged that one might actually be able to price some of these online. When you say itineraries with backtacking, do you mean the likes of AAA-BBB-CCC-BBB-AAA would not price? [Without a stopover, I would personally argue this should not be classified as "backtracking"].
Originally Posted by
Fossiebear
I would also note that recent coverage of these redemptions in blogs eg HFP a few weeks ago presenting these redemptions as an opportunity to book 8 award flights without any constraints no doubt raises the number of queries coming into BA and the scrutiny around them.
I'd forgotten about the HFP coverage, though my assumption with these rewards is that they will attract enough notice to be questioned
at some point. On the one hand that wouldn't be the worst thing if it merely causes BA to actually publish the rules we're having to infer from anecdote - on the other it could result in the removal of some of the better features.
Originally Posted by
Fossiebear
A final word of caution, even if your discussion with the agent goes smoothly and the itinerary isnt challenged there is still a decent chance it will be rejected by ticketing. Given the time it takes to root out award availability this is particularly frustrating.
Yes - this is one of my concerns as regards changing itineraries. I would hope that existing ticketed flights would be kept until a revised itinerary is issued, such that if the new itinerary falls foul of one of the unseen rules one is still in possession of the original ticket.
More generally, I can't see that any of these rules would be difficult to implement in whatever tool the agents use to build the itinerary [and indeed they do seem to be built in to the website for simple round trips] such that one cannot have an itinerary accepted by the agent but rejected by ticketing.