nux

No you can't do it online, and it is not an upgrade but a change to the ticket. You would need to pay the change fee and likely the phone service fee plus the additional avios.

Steve_19

Thanks for the feedback - will keep plugging away at it

hitek0007

Does anyone know why LHR-TXL availability in Jul/Aug 2015 has been completely removed?

totti

I have a quick question regarding recent award availability and your experiences. I thought the changes to BA EC were meant to improve award availability. However, I am currently looking for premium awards from Europe to the USA and I can hardly find any availability for the the reminder of 2015.

I know that the holiday season is very busy but in previous years I never had any issues in finding availability for one person on routes such as NYC-LHR. But now this seems almost impossible, even on routes that are regularly severed by BA such as JFK-LHR. For example, there is not a single award seat in the next 4 weeks for NYC-LHR in CW and only 1 seat on one of the BA day flights in F.

As anybody else experienced this lately? Award availability has always been an issue but it seems to get worse, which is quite annoying given that many of us sit on tons of miles.

IMH

The biggest relevant change to BAEC was the introduction of some guaranteed availability (in Y and J) on every flight. That is great for people who can book 355 days in advance -- something many of us are able to do for some trips. For other trips, search as early as possible and keep looking. The more flexible you can be (dates, airports) the better your chances.

Yes: many people have millions of miles. There are lots of large merged AA/US balances, which people want to spend before AA devalues, and some very large Avios balances. Right now Chase is again offering up to 100,000 Avios for US residents who get a BA Visa card and hit spend targets. Someone making the most of that offer will soon find themselves with 130,000+ Avios and a 2-4-1 voucher. That creates a LOT of demand for TATL redemption space.

totti

Thanks for the insights. Good to know but not good in general I have a lot of TATL travel in the next 24 month again and wanted to burn as many miles as possible but it looks like I will end up with paid flights and even more miles… I cannot and do not want to book too long in advance. But probably I should try for some flights.

IMH

It's probably worth making the effort. Remember that BAEC redemption bookings are easy and fairly cheap (55 USD per person) to cancel if your plans change or a sufficiently attractive sale comes along. Having lots of Avios lets you take advantage of this. (Remember also that other people make speculative or 'placeholder' bookings. Their cancellations can open up availability at almost any time.)

We often book award travel 11+ months out, but not always. This week I finished booking a Thanksgiving trip when 2 Club World seats became available on a LHR-IAH flight I'd been monitoring. For the outbound we were able to book 2 x F out of AUS back in July.

star_crazy

I'm close to giving up on BA for long haul J or F seats.

I am sitting on close to 1 million Avios and find it almost impossible to secure premium seats to the US. Ideally, I book WTP and then would like to upgrade to J or F but it is simply never possible.

The knock on effect is I seriously question the value of retaining Gold each year and will probably let it slide to Silver and ensure I keep or add status on Star and VS.

The idea that BA were going to make more reward seats available is, as we probably suspected, nonsense.

mikeyfly

I don't want to get into the "never any seats" discussion - just wondering if there's any historical patterns on when seats might become available when routes / cabins are re-introduced. LHR-LAS is selling F again from next month - but there is no Avios availability at all for next six months (have been checking since March!). Have seen plenty come and go on the LAS-LHR so just interested to know if they are kept back to see how sales go etc or what the thinking might be on releasing Avios F.. Any insight appreciated

DG55

Agreed. I've been finding it almost impossible to find anything for 2 in J to anywhere on the west coast, for the next 6 months.

LAX, SFO, PHX, LAS (LHR), DFW, SAN

Nothing. Whereas last year there was surprisingly reasonable availability to LAX. Maybe this is something to do with capacity though, they had 2x 380 on the route last winter, but its now 1x 380 and 1x 777.

SteveF

Without wishing to sound like a BA apologist, that statement was never made by BA, so anyone who had that idea just made it up.

The guarantee was that at least two seats in J and at least a certain number (I can't remember how many because quite frankly I don't care) in Y would be released on every flight at exactly T-355 days before departure. There is no guarantee at all regarding the release of WT+ or F seats.

This is quite different to the previous rules regarding reward seats, where there was no promise of J seats on every flight.

So the J seats are there (at least two of them) on every flight; you just have to get up early on T-355 to try to grab them on popular routes.

IMH

Actually, it was. I can no longer find the original page on ba.com, but if you search (either FT or the web) you'll soon find that they used the phrase: "We're making these changes to be able to offer more reward seats to you".

I'm not really surprised by "almost impossible" (my emphasis). It's just as SteveF says: other people were faster. If you look 11+ months out you'll see availability opening up on a daily basis. If you check regularly you will also see cancelled awards becoming available again, although obviously there's no predictable pattern to that.

Tim_T

There was loads of west coast availability the other week when BA announced San Jose flights;-) also plenty of first to San Diego when that was changed.

SteveF

Oops; then I apologize.

Globaliser

Other than the promise to release 2 J seats on each flight, we really have no way of knowing whether there has been a concerted increase in the number of award seats overall - particularly if the increase has mostly been in the Y cabin. If there are significantly more Y award seats but we choose not to make use of them, that's our choice.

So it seems to me to be pretty much impossible for any of us to say that the promise was "nonsense".