nux

Could well be no availability for the dates you chose.

To upgrade you need award space in the higher cabin, in this case CW for all legs. It may be better to start by searching for award seats in CW for each leg around the dates you want. Once you find a routing with CW award availability, use the 'Book with cash upgrade with avios' option, select WT+ and upgrade outbound/inbound, then select the same flights you've found.

The price will be the underlying WT+ fare, plus additional taxes/fees/carrier charges for CW over WT+, plus avios.

stifle

My reading of it is that the itinerary is complicated enough that ba.com coughed up a hairball and priced it into W class then upgraded it. If the straight WT+ cash booking fee is a sensible amount then phone up BA to book and upgrade at the lower price in the one transaction.

nux

The giveaway is that the avios amount of 90,000 is 1x economy, which can only be for a CW->F UuA. WT+ to CW would be 0.5x that at 45,000.

walkingtall

To be honest I never really look for seat availability due to using jokers when I needed to use miles , but all last week I checked my flight to hk on Monday to see if any cw -f seats would be available , nothing appeared , the only availability was wtp.

On boarding the flight , cw was half full , I asked about f and again about half full.

Not that I was too bothered about the upgrade , but it did get me thinking why don't they release seats for mileage if the cabins are half full?

I accept hkg is a business route , and bookings can be made at last min but still seemed a shame to have half empty cabins and no mileage seats available.

layz

When was the last time you checked on Avios availability? I've seen availability open up the same day as the flight before.

There's also an element of BA not wanting to release Avios seats on every single flight with spare seats. They don't want business and other passengers that really must travel knowing that they can depend on Avios availability if there's free seats.

BitPipe

I currently have a CW return to the US on a midweek date in Jan and am monitoring the outbound for F (UD in CW on the way home so quite happy with that). F cabin has only sold 2 seats (Expert Flyer) so there are 12 left, however no reward availability - I'm checking multiple times a day just in case but the above anecdote suggests that they may be happy to leave the cabin nearly empty. Still, fingers crossed!

Jordan D

Not quite the regular at redeeming Avios, but any guidance (other than to constantly keep checking) on premium cabin availability in November to BKK on BA.

I can get there on QR/RJ/AY, but I've got an Amex 2-for-1 which would be best used ...!

Edit: other than Chengdu (there's a surprise!) availability to SIN/HKG also seems pretty bad. I assume this is normal?

laura711

The HKG route is notoriously bad for CW redemption seats, as I suspect is SIN, both being popular business (and leisure) destinations.

BKK is generally much better - I actually booked and UuAed a BKK-LHR (on BA) for September, and there was plenty of availability, still 9 redemption seats.

nux

Award seats are released up to 355 days in advance, and typically not during sales. So wait and check after the current sale.

BA does not offer F to BKK anymore so you would be looking for CW availability only.

Also don't use the award map as it is inaccurate, but search for an individual route.

Jordan D

Plenty availability in WT, on all three, very limited in WT+. Will check on it once the sale ends (that's the end of the month, right). Fingers crossed something pops up from BKK ... annoyingly the Thai BKK-CTU (Chengdu) flight arrives later in the day than the BA departure, so that knocks that options out as a connector.

Furton

Can someone provide some advice on strategy for getting CW tickets on WT+ with UUA. Should I just book two WT+ tickets now and check for upgrades every day or wait until I find at least one leg on UUA?

Trying to get to NY late April early May but availability is no poor at the moment.

stifle

Whether you have booked the flight or not is not very likely to make a material difference to reward availability, so the question is this: is this a journey you need to make and are you willing to travel in WTP ?

Furton

It's more ofba luxury for a bday treat!

HilFly

Just an observation.

I have been looking for availability to book and UUA from WT+ to CW for a couple of LHR-BOS-XXX tickets for travel in July and August. I have been looking since September of last year. The only availability has been on the 238 which does not connect in time to my XXX flights.

I decided today that I was not prepared to waste any more time on this so I decided to buy all cash business class tickets. BA came out quite well pricewise because I actually caught a sale so I booked two tickets.

I saw the seatmaps on BA when I reserved my seats and I also looked at all cabins on expertflyer.com

BOS - LHR flight 1. I am the only passenger with a reserved seat in CW or F. 1 seat reserved in WT+. 5 seats reserved in WT.

BOS - LHR flight 2. 1 other reserved seat in CW. No seat reserved in F. No seats reserved in WT+. 10 seats reserved in WT.

LHR - BOS flight 1. 1 other seat reserved in CW. No more reserved seats on the aircraft.

LHR - BOS flight 2. 1 other reserved seat in CW. None in F. 3 in WT+. 7 in WT.

I don't think there has been any other redemption availability on these flights. I think if fellow BAEC'ers had scooped up all the redemption availability that I missed, surely some of them would have had status to reserve seats.

I don't think the lack of redemption seats is caused by plenty of cash bookings, either. Again, surely if the flight was already well booked at least some of the passengers would have had status or paid to reserve seats.

BA are just not releasing as many reward seats.

stifle

The seat maps are not an indicator of how many seats have been sold, for the simple reason that non-status passengers need to pay to preassign seats unless they fall into one of the exception categories.