Originally Posted by
Blueheaven
We have BA Avios since the last 12 years or so. Over 5 years ago, we would find decent domestic US awards and would sometime find international asia awards on partners. But since the last 5 years and specially last 24 months, every time I search for any domestic US coach or any international partner awards, I never find anything there even after changing the date or to a different .
airport. Everytime we go there to fins something, it is like a ghost town with nothing else to see.
Regardless of never finding any awards domestic or international on BA, I know they still killed the redemption rate on US domestic awards recently and making the award program complete useless for domestic awards. It is like domestic awards don't exist but we will still kill the rate.
I always end up using AA, UA or Alaska miles for domestic or international awards
So this begs the question, is there anything else we can do about our BA Avios points that we worked hard to earn for years? Qatar website where we can transfer and book Qatar award is equally bad with very bad domestic award rate and very rarely releases international qatar awards. if you have tips or tricks on using Avios on Qatar, pls share.
Any tricks to convert the BA Avios to AA, UA Alaska , Aeroplan miles or to any hotel points?
I book a lot of AA Avios flights. I've found that the availability link doesn't work at all well on BA. For connecting flights it very very often doesn't show availability unless you put in each sector separately. So my route is SDQ > MIA > CHS and on a particular day it often shows zero availability, but when I book SDQ > MIA it's wide open, and similar a connecting flight to CHS 3 hours after arrival in MIA is also wide open.
The other thing is that quite often the grid shows zero availability on any day in a booking window. When it does this, I search again an hour or so later, or using a different browser / login and availability pops up. Unlike you, I'm always amazed how many Avios seats are available on AA, I can always find seats each day. Availability is also very inconsistent on the Qatar Airways site for AA flights, quite often I can see a flight on BA but it shows as unavailable on QA.
I would suggest that you use other tools to check for availability, I think PointsYeah does AA and I'm sure there are several others. Or just try different browsers or search again at a different time. I'm so used to it that I can spot when the BA site is having a headache and when it's showing me the truth now.