Long time lurker, first post
Very confused and a bit upset.
Honeymoon booked June 2020 outbound to Singapore return from Hong Kong F/J. Booked last july, just when F Seats to SIN opened up (A380 flight) 2-4-1 voucher.
Obviously relieved not to be going anywhere right now
Phoned BA to try to rebook for Dec or Jan...
BUT BA have said that because my ticket was booked in July 2019, they can only rebook us on any flight up to July 2020 (which is basically useless), and from then on we are limited to Avios availability. Obviously these routes, certainly in F, require a 12 month lead time, basically they are saying we should cancel, reclaim our Avios and rebook 12 months out. So any eventual travel on that itinerary will be around 23 months from our original booking (not much of a honeymoon any more!).
Assuming global rules, vaccines etc permit travel within the next 12 months, we want to travel sooner than that.
Effectively BA seem to be saying that because there are long-lead award tickets, we don't have any rights that result from them cancelling the flights. All the public advice on here and in the british media is ‘if you can wait for airline to cancel and you will have more rights’. But this seems NOT TRUE for Avios bookings.
Is this correct? Is there anything else I should be trying before we just give up and Canx the tickets?
Furthermore, our plans were that we would make use of my Gold Status for seat booking and lounge access on these flights and down route. Travel 12 months from now (or indeed even from Autumn) will almost certainly see me bumped down to Silver (assuming status is not extended as I am less than 50% towards requalification with y/e Aug/September). Any grounds for leniency here? Part of the perks of the trip was going to be First Class lounge access at every stage.....
Anyone have any advice? This all seems rather ‘computer says no’ and not ‘we want to help our customers in difficult times’