Knowing your ticket code while purchasing
 

I am somewhat of a newbie here. And tried looking for the answer but haven't found it here. And BA hasn't called back thus yet.

I Just purchased a ticket OSL-LHR with return through the BA APP. Checked for upgrade availability before purchase and since you still can't upgrade yourself I called the EC customer service. When I made my purchase on the app my choice was Low or flexible. I knew I wasn't making any changes I took low as I usually do. I am a silver member and upgrade often and never have had this problem before purchasing through "Low" fare. The EC rep states she can only upgrade the inbound flight since my outbound flight is a O ticket, which costed more than the inbound flight.

So my question was this (to her as well), when purchasing, is there a way to see what ticket class I'm buying at the time? Instead of getting a surprise afterwards. I could have possibly changed how I bought it and purchased a CE ticket for my return for example or picked a different flight. Which my plan is now, after writing this, to cancel the tickets and repurchase.

Can't they somehow get that small (important) thing into there website and APP as well??? One has to have dreams... :-D

on the app on the flight list page showing prices select the "Details ˅" for the specific flight you are interested in, and this should bring up a pop up displaying selling classes at the bottom.

The other point to remember is that even if you did buy in to the wrong selling class (typically O or Q) then you have 24 hours to rectify it without paying anything over the odds. So you don't necessarily need to cancel, just amend. You can therefore buy the cheapest and immediately call up to be put into a selling class which is OK for Upgrade Using Avios (typically N or above). You have to pay the fare difference but no further penalty. O to N can be quite modest, £5 to £20 isn't unusual. Even if UuA isn't available at that stage it may be worth doing to keep that flexibility later on, and you also double your TPs from typically 5 or 10 to 10 or 20 TPs.

also if you wait for 48 hours you may get a cash promotional upgrade offer (POUG) in MMB so that may be a cheap way to upgrade in to CE.

Ok. First Thanks so much to both of you by answering my question. :D

I tried to amend the ticket but it was quiet a bit more to get to flexible (£267) plus then 7500 avios to upgrade to CW, Than it was to cancel the ticket and re-book it with buy my outbound in CW directly. Will look into flexible at the end of the TP year if I need a just a bit more instead of wasting my long haul flights and a TP flood over.

You do not need to be in a flexible fare grade for UuA, N is also inflexible and sometimes the cheapest ticket on sale. You can't rely on doing this purely via BA.com website, you either need some specialist knowledge or tools, or get specifics from this forum, or call up BA. Given the number of Avios, which is something like a UuA from LHR to FCO, £267 is way above what I would expect.

Are there sub-buckets within a fare code? I had this one instance where I was trying to UuA from CW (Fare code I) to F and was told that my fare rules disallowed upgrading using Avios. Here I thought all CW fares paid with cash, even discounted ones, were eligible for UuA.

I class would normally allow UuA, but there are certain further conditions needed for UuA, so for example if it was a private fare, or not plated by BA (125 ticket) or there were other sectors non on BA on the ticket this may well inhibit UuA.

It was definitely was a 125 ticket, but I am not sure what you mean by a private fare; I purchased it on the BA website then applied the Chase BA promotion code for 10% off. Maybe that was the problem? But again, I have bought WTP tickets with the 10% discount, and UuA'd to CW at least half a dozen times. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In terms of discovering the fare difference between the cheapest shown on BAs website and the next one(s) “up” - how is it best to go about this?

I realise an ExpertFlyer subscription might tell you there are x “N” class seats left, for example. I guess you could also force Matrix, via a series of searches and prior knowledge about the hierarchy of fare codes, to tell you how much different buckets are for a given route.

But is there a way to quickly compare the prices of available buckets while searching a given route/flight? Obviously BA’s site won’t do this. But I suspect buying the cheapest then ringing up to pay the difference could quickly get tiresome if you have no idea of what that difference would be until you ring (and if, for example, a slightly different flight on the same day was considerably less for the upgraded fare bucket).

I guess what I’m asking for is comparable to a lot of train ticket websites in the UK these days - you get a grid of availability for specific ticket types.

Is there a way of avoiding running a series of manual fare bucket searches on Matrix, combined with an ExpertFlyer subscription, to see at a glance what the options are for different fare buckets?

That should have been OK still unless there was some other complication. Private fares include corporate fares, but Chase discounted fares aren't private. It may have been a case for hanging up and calling again.

Expertflyer gives fare information. Now if you actually buy a O or Q fare then checkmytrip will give the fare basis, then you can use Expertflyer to identify that fare basis, swap the selling class from O to N, and it may even be obvious (e.g. if the cheapest fare basis is OZ0RO there may also be NZ0RO with identical conditions). The fare shown is the base fare, so the taxes have to be added, these are usually identical between O and N.

You can also use ITA since if you find the cheapest O fare - and don't have too many options then after a page or two of O or Q fare combinations you should hit N.

But I usually can get a quick hunch on this by using the BA Find Our Cheapest Flight - this will be for O or Q. If you then look at the fares around, it which are a bit more expensive - same day, or a day or two away, then you can often get an N fare. Just click on the flight number to be sure, the Selling Class will move from O to N, with any luck. So you may find a round trip O fare at £70, and then an N fare at £99, to take a current example for OSL. That's a typical gap on a return fare from O to N, around £30 return.

Occasionally V is cheaper than N, and there are other complications, regarding one way and return fares, but that's the essence of it.

Thank you [MENTION=262802]corporate-wage-slave[/MENTION] - that is a very useful post!