Originally Posted by
BA refund helper
The rules of the Exec club state, among other rules, that -
15.12. Rewards for travel will only be issued to and from destinations served by British Airways and/or Airline Partners designated at the time the ticket is issued and also at the time the ticket is used. The most direct routing must be taken.
15.13. Rewards are based on round trip travel between origin and destination using the most direct route possible. Rewards may be for more than one flight sector. On no more than one occasion per Reward may a flight sector commence at a different point from the end of the preceding flight sector. It is possible to combine flights on British Airways and Service Partner airlines to make a round trip journey of up to a maximum of 8 sectors.
The team making the booking should be aware of this and reject any requests which fall outside it, but if not the "safety net" is the Fares dept to reject it. As above, some "creative" routes have slipped through however for the OP's example it was stopping in 3 separate places so couldn't be considered the most direct route between origin and destination, which is why we rejected the request to add a fare.
I hope that helps clarify it somewhat for you.
best wishes
I appreciate the reply, but I'm honestly not sure it's actually clarifying the
de facto situation - at least to me...!
On the "most direct routing" language: this is pretty clearly not as strong as the language would suggest. To take just one example, PER-LHR [or vv] would likely become almost unticketable on Avios, because the existence of the direct QF flight would rule out PER-DOH-LHR since it's
40 miles and one connection longer*. Even the Avios search tool doesn't seem to enforce this rule - I'm pretty sure it'll show PER-DOH-LHR at the very least. Thus if - as it appears - there is some "wiggle room" in the rule it comes back to a bit of YMMV from the agents involved. In the case of the OP's original itinerary [and assuming a destination of NAN] then the only leg where they aren't making some "progress in the right direction" would seem to me to be LHR-DUB.
For the point about the "stopping in three separate places" - this would seem to be a simple question of whether stopovers are allowed or not...? Assuming they are allowed, then since stopovers are clearly defined they could presumably be limited in terms of numbers. Maybe those rules live somewhere else though, but the rules you quote don't do so. Obviously it would be a big change in how we understand and use these tickets if stopovers were
not allowed - but for the moment I'll just assume that the remain permitted and thus aren't explicitly OP's problem.
Which seems to leave the definition of "destination". Now admittedly it sounds like OP wants a few days in NAN and two months in TFU, so calling TFU the destination - and thus not permitting a routing
to TFU
via NAN - is not unreasonable. However, this again seems rather YMMV. What if OP was spending 7 days in NAN and 8 in TFU? Indeed, I'm hardly alone on this forum in having had itineraries with 1-2 weeks at the fare break [or indeed about 35 minutes in one case] but with stopovers of several months, so it's hardly clear-cut.
Again: I do appreciate the contribution and it's helpful to know where the 8 segment and 1 open-jaw limits come from. Unfortunately I think the situation around "most direct routing" and "destination" remain as murky as ever.
*For the sake of the argument I'm assuming QF aren't releasing a huge amount of reward space on this route - at least in premium cabins - though I could be wrong there.