Fair play to anyone able to commit to leisure travel a year in advance, but I cannot and I suspect I am not alone. Whilst booking this far in advance seems almost compulsory with BA miles other mileage schemes anecdotally seem to offer mileage redemption bookings with far less notice practically required. I am led to believe that LH (as mentioned above), CX, TG, EK, SQ and even BD make life much easier especially for their elites. The advance booking requirement would not matter so much if BA retained the penalty free cancellation option they once had for Golds, but with a minimum £25 per person plus offline booking fees (potentially) the costs of holding multiple potemtial bookings can be quite high. It also seems impossible to apply an Amex voucher to more than one booking (even if the intention is to only ever use one booking).

I am finding that BA Amex vouchers are becoming fairly pointless for me, since I can never use them to go anywhere that is easy for me to travel to (my partner being a Thai national does somewhat restrict the potential destination list, without lots of visa hassles). If it were not for the travel cushion insurance offered by Amex on the BA card, I would almost certainly have migrated my account to Europe by now.

I somehow suspect the redemption picture will be even bleaker in the future with more routes migrating to 777 operations.