Honeymoon - BA points advice and tips
 

Hi all,

First post here and hopefully you can help. We're planning on booking our honeymoon soon for Sept 2015 in the Pacific/South East Asia area. I have 120,000 BA points I would like to use to upgrade from World Traveller Plus to Business.

Now if my calculations are correct (using Singapore as a destination, and London as the departure point), I will need 35,000 points each to upgrade the out/in flights? Totalling 70,000 points to fly business for the both of us, both outbound and inbound?

At the moment I have a personal BA account, I presume I will have to convert this to a household account to share my points with my 'soon to be!' wife?

I've read and heard there are restrictions on what flights are eligible to upgrade with points? How can I be sure that the flights I book can be upgraded with my points? Can you do it all online at the time of booking? Or is it best to phone and book with a BA advisor?

Lastly, is there a particularly good time to book to get a better price? Sale periods?

Thanks in advance!

To upgrade WTP to CW with avios you require 0.5x the economy avios, so yes that would be 35,000 each return for LHR-SIN.

Any published WTP fare can be upgraded with avios (so any that you purchase on BA.com).

To upgrade there must be CW award availability on your flight which is where you will likely have difficulty. These are often taken when they are released 354 days in advance. During a sale there may be no award seats available when you want to travel, so although you may get a good price for WTP you may not be able to upgrade. Award seats may be released at any time or close to departure, but there is no guarantee this will happen.

Currently it looks like there are 2 days with 2 CW award seats for LHR-SIN, and 3 days with 2 CW award seats for SIN-LHR.

If you have some time you may want to look at ex-EU CW fares.

Your calculations are right. Any WT+ fare is eligible to be upgraded this way, but only if there is award availability. This will be your main restriction because award seats to SIN are very tight. Try a straightforward "Book with avios" search to see available dates (you will book differently, but from the same inventory).

Alternatives are Kuala Lumpar (also 35k) or Bangkok / Hong Kong (30k) or there's also Seoul/Tokyo/Shanghai/Beijing further afield.

You can do it in one go online if there is availability, or you can process the upgrade later if availability opens up but this is higher-risk.

Welcome to FT Sylar. ^

Availability to the far east is quite good in Club, but you might need to be a bit flexible regarding the BA port which you fly to.

2x CW seats to SIN are only currently available if you fly outbound on 22nd September and inbound on either 28th or 29th September. HKG on the other hand has availability on 2nd or 23rd outbound and 8th, 21st and 28th inbound.

PVG has availability outbound every day apart from 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th, 20th, 21st, 27th and 28th and inbound every day apart from 4th, 5th, 11th, 18th, 25th and 27th.

Correct. For HKG and PVG you will need 60k in total.

Not correct. You can use your Avios to book flights for others even if they are not in a household account with you.

All WT+ fares that you buy through ba.com or the BA call centre are upgradeable. But it is best to do it all in one transaction, either online or over the phone, so that you can be 100% sure of getting Club seats.

Given the excellent availability to PVG at the moment I would be inclined to book now, as even if a better fare might appear in the future you will probably only save a couple of hundred Pounds, will be worrying for months about whether the availability will still be there and in the end might not be able to get your first-choice dates.

Welcome to FT also :)

Depends on where you want to go for your Honeymoon - I'd personally not fancy PVG, nor do I think it counts as SE Asia.

KUL did have a lot of initial availability for reward seats when first released, not sure if this is still the case?

I'd look to go KUL, SIN or BKK (which may be a 787 then?) as more SE Asia and not too tricky to get flights into the more traditional honeymoon locations from there.

PS - Congratulations :)

Thanks for all the advice! Sounds like I'm on the right track then, but good to know about getting in there quick with the availability, hopefully there should still be something left, as others have pointed out, were not massively fussed where we land to as long as its in the vicinity (and hopefully its worth a couple of days there too).

We did even think about a while in Japan then down to more traditional honeymoon destinations but actually its a pretty long flight down and could work out pretty expensive.

Welcome to FT Sylar plenty of useful tips here and I even got help from FT regarding hotels in the region (Hotel Panorama in HKG was pretty nice and not too expensive).

Congrats :)

Thanks guys! So got itchy fingers tonight and booked the flights as I discovered reward seats were very sparse for Aug/Sept already. We managed to get 3 weeks to KL in business for basically a third of normal cost, awesome!

Planning on 3 nights in KL, 2 weeks in Bali, and 3 nights in Singapore before hopping back to KL and going home.

Thanks all.

Welcome Sylar
 

My belated welcome to you Sylar, welcome to Flyertalk and the BA Board, it's great you have already got that booked and I'm sure you will have a good time out there with this. I hope you will continue to be active in this forum.

If I was going to make any suggestions, for Malaysia consider going to Langkawi at some point (though people keep saying it's not as good as it used to be, but that has been said about everywhere at some point); also the Cameron Highlands where I spent some of my childhood. Amazing place. Also about 90 minutes out of KL there is a firefly resort, a creek with trees where the fireflies put on a magic and romantic display every evening. You go out along the creek in a silent electric barge to see this sight. Perhaps combined with a Chinese meal out. This is at Kuala Selangor Fireflies Resort Park.

Welcome Sylar!

Some good advice above. In due course, please let us know what you book.