Avios and AerLingus Useless for Transatlantic Business?
 

New to the forum and seems to be a great resource.

I have been struggling to make use of a lot of Avios miles on Aer Lingus for business class.
Seems economy availability is quite good, but there seems to be zero business availability ever.
(BOS-->DUB)

BA has plenty of connecting availability on similar routes and dates through the Avios site.
Aer Lingus always just economy only.

I also looked into an requesting an avios upgrade a after purchasing an economy ticket, but Aer Lingus will not answer upgrade availability questions until after one purchases a ticket, which is a bogus way of doing things.

BA seem to know how to work with the avios program, but aerlingus seem clueless.

So is this who Aer Lngus and avios thing just a sham and are people better off just avoiding their program if upgrades are what they are after, or am I just unlucky in what I am searching for? I have looked at Expert Flyer too and availability just not there.

Unfortunately the award business availability is quite poor for Aer Lingus. As standard 1 business class seat is released for each flight and as BOS-DUB is a popular route they can be snapped up. Sometimes more seats are made available closer to departure (if you look at flights within the next month) and once in a blue moon you'll find 2 seats available for avios booking but this is the exception rather than the rule. Upgrading via avios is again only possible if award seats are available so you are running into the same problem.

BA tend to have bigger business cabins and they as standard release 2 business seats for each flight for avios bookings and again more can open up closer to departure depending on loading etc. The way aer lingus work with avios.com is not ideal at all imo when booking flights. But avoiding the program as a result is maybe overkill as it is somewhat linked to BA's by being able to transfer avios freely between the two so if you prefer just use BAs booking system for flights by transferring your avios but this will not help you find any more business availability on aer lingus metal.

Thanks and appreciate your detailed repsonse.
It aligns with what i was seeing.

i think its fair to warn people that if collecting avios for use on aer lingus to upgrade to business on transatlantic, their program is best avoided, as they don't seem to be able to deliver on what they are advertising.

It has put me off getting their US credit card offer too, as they don't seem to be able to deliver on the benefits their card advertises.

Yes I think that is fair, obviously aer lingus are not going to do that. I feel for people new or inexperienced using the avios program in general (EI,BA,IB) as most have the impression in the beginning you earn avios and can then get 'free' or close to free flights or get business class flights or upgrades when in fact the availability of business tickets is quite low and flights are far from free (I'm not sure how aware you are of the high fees applied to avios bookings). In certain cases on short haul flights it is actually cheaper to book a cash fare than use your avios and pay fees or that you'll find you are saving very little money using avios versus cash fare (small caveat here is avios fares are full fare tickets with baggage and cancellation benefits but more often than not you will not be needing these). The fact is, often to get good value use of your avios you need to be quite familiar with the scheme and also use forums like this or frequent flier dedicated websites like headforpoints and even then it can be a challenge. From my brief experience when I had AA status the value of miles was much more straight forward and closer to how you would assume from a beginner stand point how they work. I think the US carrier programs are superior in this way but none are without their own restrictions and limitations.

I blame all the bloggers telling people how easy it is to fly for free!

Luckily most of my miles are on the chase reserve card which can be used for lots of useful things and covers cdw for irish rentals.
ill avoid the aerlingus credit card like the plague and use my remaining avios for transatlantic economy for people - 50% off.
The hassle of trying to spend hours trawling for non existant business flights does not appeal to me.
Between aerclub and this, they have really gone downhill...

This is typically a terrible use of miles, given the surcharges you'll face. Using Avios for domestic US is surprisingly good value, however.

Thanks. My main use case is transatlantic, but good to know.

With Avios you can spend on any oneworld airline as well as EI. BA generally do have reasonable availability for 2 seats in Club World. You will have to connect through LHR though. Alteratively you can book AA flights using avois too. Redeeming award seats isn't like paying cash, sadly you can't just use avois instead of cash, if a seat is for sale. I don't know of any airline FFP that allows that, you could part-pay with Avios, but that is, generally, terrible value.

Just this week I priced an off-peak ORD-LHR return trip in Y. Via BA, the all-in cash fare in Basic Economy was about $580. A cash + Avios option was a certain amount of Avios plus a sum in excess of $600, valuing the Avios at < 0. Living in the US the only really valid use cases for Avios are short-haul domestic trips on AA or flights to Asia / Oceania on other OW carriers. I suspect most people attempting the most logical redemption scenarios come away thinking the program is not worth the effort.

I thought that the surcharges for Avios TATL redemptions on EI were quite reasonable. Has that changed?

They are reasonable versus BA but speaking generally compared to US carrier mileage redemption's they are high.

The weird thing is that United seemingly have access to more EI award seats than BAEC/Avios has. The newly announced route DUB-MSP being an example.

When I checked last week, United had access to 4 biz award sets on each of 4 consecutive flights in Aug, Avios.com wasn't showing any biz award seats on any of those flights. One has to ask the logic in an IAG sister company having no inventory, whilst united have good inventory.

And this isn't just a fluke. A year ago when I was searching for 2xbiz seats for MIA-DUB, I got them using UA miles on united, on the same flight, Avios.com was only showing a single biz award seat.