TLardner

Just tried to book a last minute trip for early next week OSL - GVA with miles and all miles availability is now blocked out until 5th May... Not sure whether this is a global thing, but not great as I have lost all the usual flexibility for reasonable costs... particularly as ticket costs seem to have gone through th eroof in the last 24 hrs...

Anyone else picked this up???

mwalsh

Yeah, you see, there is this whole volcano thing......

travelinfoo

OMG! Is this a serious post? You are aware of the news of the past 6 days?! You know, volcano & huge ash cloud!

There is a huge backlog of passengers that BA and the rest of the held airlines need to clear. They'll be lucky if they get everyone situated properly in a week! Of course, there are NO award seats for awhile!

AJLondon

volcano? what volcano? Is this to do with some of those eruptions that Swanhunter alluded to on the "Floatertalk" thread...

koshka

Volcanoes aside I agree that there might be a block on miles bookings until the 5th. I've got a cash/miles booking LHR to ARN tomorrow if it departs. First booked on Friday for Monday and then changed to tomorrow on Sunday. This Saturday and most days next week were available until yesterday when it suddenly jumped to the 5th. Cash flights were available at various prices and suddenly leapt to Business only one way £636 at the same time - again to 5th May.

wiluk

For some reason (maybe wine) this made me chuckle rather a lot.

njswamps

Oh, you just need to type the "secret" promotion code to open up rewards.
It is Eyjafjallajokull
Say three times and click your heals

TLardner

Ah.. so that's what it's all about then eh.....

Although there was a hint of seriousness. Having already cancelled a couple of trips this week, I was trying to consolidate and take advantage of the spring rewards offered to we living outside Europe. On Monday, rewards were all open, and R class seats available for about 6000NOK. Tuesday, cheapest economy was coming in around 12,000...

Merely an observation - and no surprise, although what did surprise me was the speed and the proportion of the increases.

So now I am flying with Norwegian for 1000...

Cyba

A back of the envelope calculation I did suggests it could take at least 10 days to re-accommodate passengers stranded over the past 6 days assuming normal load factors on these flights but taking into consideration that a reasonable number of passengers who have cancelled their trips altogether.

When adjusting for the fact that most flights were booked solid over the weekend for the end of school holidays, the backlog could take 2 weeks to clear which takes us easily to 5 May.

A block on redemption bookings makes total sense to me though there may be the odd flight here and there which might become available as time goes by.

T8191

Useful info - thanks. I was due out of LHR today [217 to IAD is cnx] and I'm about to try to rebook my MFU holiday flights.

I'll plan that for mid-May

TLardner

And then, all of a sudden.... POOF.... back to normal with prices and availability back to normal...

How very queer...

T8191

Well .... I walked into our local BA office this morning [easier than being on the telephone] to try to shift our booking [we lost out on Tue/Wed] to next month.

The response was "Oh, you're on a Reward Booking - you have to contact BAEC", which is of course almost impossible at the moment.

Can you help? "The computer says no."
Do you have a phone line you could use? "The computer says no."
So what do we do? "Call BAEC."

Four women, three of them sat there doing nothing. "The computer says no."
Somehow theres a bit of "Not completely joined up software" in the system.
And some NFI staff.

I know it's an MFU flight, but they still have nearly £900 per person of real money. Am I a bad person for using MFU?

And BAEC aren't taking calls either.