Has there been a sale within a sale?
 

Odd question - I booked 2 WT+ seats on 3rd Jan to travel to EWR from London at the end of june.

I thought we had sale seats as advertised on the website. However just checked and the seats are now c. £350 cheaper return. A bit of a kick in the teeth really.

Have they had a further reduction or did I somehow book seats in a sale, that weren't actually on sale, and have only now just gone on sale?

There's nothing that requires that the "sale" price that BA advertises will be the lowest sale price they offer in perpetuity.

Perhaps your flights were a bit more expensive (perhaps due to being more full, etc.) at the time you booked than the truly absolute cheapest fair on BA available at the time?

It looks like the answer is yes. Originally, the sale fares covered only travel dates 25/12/12 to 31/03/12 (season L) and 01/04/12 to 22/06/12 and 19/08/12 to 30/09/12 (season H).

Since then, a sale fare has been filed to cover 23/06/12 to 18/08/12 (season K).

The same has been reported by matthewuk about economy fares - see here.

Ah bugger...

Guess that's the last time I get suckered by the "2 seats left at the this price" footnote...!

If it's any consolation, that did mean that on the flight that had that footnote, there were genuinely only two T class seats left at that time. If someone else had bought them, the chances are that the only WT+ seats then offered for sale immediately afterwards would be E class seats. So if you hadn't bought the tickets then, at the price you actually paid, you might have found that the newly-filed sale fare was purely theoretical for you, because there was no availability left in T class anyway so you could never have used it.

Obviously, availability comes and goes; and you might instead have found that more T class seats were made available for the flight and you could then have booked them at the newly-filed sale fare. Or you might have found other flights with T class seats that were equally acceptable to you because you had the flexibility to use them instead. None of this is predictable.

But what it illustrates (again) is that one shouldn't buy a fare just because the airline says there's a sale on; and one shouldn't not buy a fare just because the airline doesn't identify or market it as a sale fare. The only sensible question to ask is: "Is this a fare I'm happy to pay now for the security of having bought it, whatever might happen to fares in the future?"

The current peak price which has just been added as described by Globaliser for EWR is £990 in WT+ which I guess is a decent price for that time of year. I'm sure in previous years the expensive WT+ tickets didn't kick in until July 1st, a week later than this year - maybe the day the bulk of school holidays start this year or the Olympics are having an effect here.

I wouldn't consider a £1340 a sale price though (assuming the OP means an extra £350 per seat) and would baulk at buying at that level purely on the basis that an extra £450 would get me a seat in Club. I'm going to take an upgrade from WT+ to Club for £225 each way every time...

I don't know the fare rules - maybe the expensive WT+ fare booked also has better cancellation or change rules. Additionally maybe it is upgradeable to said Club fare described above! ;)

Sorry, should have said we MFU'd

Agree - it's a fare I was happy to pay to secure the seats as they fit our timing and i figured these were the ast seats available we could MFU.

Just galling that they are now on sale and for my same outbound flight, guess what - "there are only 2 available seats left at this price"!

So we paid £2700 and 40k miles to fly club. Not too bad, but I would have preferred saving the £700 and putting that towards accommodation.

But you live and learn!

This is, unfortunately, bound to happen sometimes. But, at least, if you keep in touch with what's happening and how it works (for example via FT), you improve your chances of winning when there are such dilemmas! Irritated as it is now, you'd probably be more irritated if you had decided to wait and see, and then found that you couldn't book T class seats at all and/or there was no MFU availability.

Oh. No...£3500 to have. Just flown club now

Yes, a little annoyed and wish I had played this a little more intelligently and just waited

Hey ho