Originally Posted by dnw
Eg, I just this week bought an ex-ATH IRCEUR fare for a nice £1380 on the aformentioned fligths. BA in Greece and ba.com couldn't help me as their inventory is Euro based and equivalent to that shown above, i.e.
I0. I called BA in the UK and they had plenty of inventory for the same itinary and at the EU price. Thats gotta be a turn out for the books- UK selling an EU origonating el-cheapo premium deal that has no availability from said EU country directly
It sounds like BA really
is abiding by the EU's instructions not to discriminate between different EU countries when selling ex-EU tickets.
Originally Posted by dnw
Absolutley right and the reason why all of the availability tools we currently love are in fact useless to anyone looking to buy a flight in or out of the UK... at least when it is busy.
...
So... where/how can we actually access UK based inventory? That *would* be useful, the ways I'm using to determine it atm are a real pain....
I think "useless" is putting it a bit high - they're just not 100% accurate all of the time for our purposes. But there are many times when I see, eg, V6 N2 and then call my UK TA who sees exactly the same and can then book it for me - sometimes resulting in the display changing to V4 N0 immediately after.
A good relationship with one's UK TA is probably the best way of doing it - although there are limits to how many times one can phone!