Originally Posted by Raffles
If this works in the same way as Expedia Special Rate hotel bookings - BA will have 'sold' 2 seats to Expedia for this flight at a discount (for them to resell at full price or any other price they wish) which is why they do not show in KVS. However, Expedia will have the right to return unsold seats to BA 24 hours prior to the flight. Hence why you can get the seat on Expedia but not on BA.
And, indeed, why a 'sold out' hotel will, very often, have rooms available via Expedia or Octopus Travel, both of whom have guaranteed daily allocations for most of the properties they sell.
Well, I can understand that for the Expedia special fares, but
(i) this is a regular D class booking using the same fare-code as BA would sell
(ii) ba telesales are offering the same seat (and the flight is two weeks away)
(iii) only expedia UK has the fare. Not the other Expedia websites.
I think that this must be something to do with this particular seat (not the farecode which is plentifully available from all sources for other dates) only being available for sale in the UK.
My guess is that if I called up BA in the US, Germany or down in the Caribbean they would not be able to give it to me. This is one of the those odd 'countries' which one can't book as an origin when logged in to the ba.com with the UK as one's home country, only when that place is selected as the home country, so it is logically also not available on ba.com, which is only offering me what is available for sale in that country ???
It is reminscent of how BA Lisbon could not give me an A class seat that BA London could give me, on the same ticket and for the same flight.
All very strange, but it does suggest that booking tickets could actually be much more complicated than even WE (the cognoscenti) had thought.