jdw111

Hullo all,

First post, so excuse the lack of lingo.

I am travelling from LHR to Manila in June. But, it's only a two-day trip. So, BA are charging a surcharge because I am not travelling over the weekend. There fare is £2,000, which is nearly four-times the price of competitors. Obviously, I won't be able to get sign-off for this.

Is there any way around this whilst collecting Avios and Tier points? (I have tried repeated negotiations....).

Feroze

Have you looked at the fare on Qatar Airways and/or Cathay Pacific? As oneworld member airlines, you will receive both TPs and Avios on both airlines.

orbitmic

Nope, the Saturday night rule is there for a reason, and precisely to make sure that more affordable fares can be offered for leisure travellers which are effectively subsidised by the fares paid for business travel. Some competitors do not have that rule or even allow cheap one ways. So either you find a way to extend the trip over the weekend, or you accept the fare, or you fly another airline.

DYKWIA

Try using BA Holidays, and adding a car or hotel. There have been reports that this gets round the Saturday night rule.

shorthauldad

How about adding a car or a hotel to the booking?

EDIT: DYKWIA beat me to it

orbitmic

Ah yes, good point, I heard it sometimes works indeed!

corporate-wage-slave

Greetings from Manila jdw111, and welcome to Flyertalk, welcome to the British Airways board, and it's great to see you here. Please make yourself at home, and please continue to post. Welcome on board.

The usual way around this is to either book a flight+hotel, or a flight+car hire, even if you don't use them (and you don't want to be driving in the Philippines if you can avoid it). However because BA don't fly directly to MNL, they aren't possible options. However you can do it to HKG (at least for hotels), so that's one option. Having looked at the prices, though, they don't seem that much better.

There are Qatar, Finnair, Malaysia, Cathay and Royal Jordanian options. You will get the same - or more - TPs with these airlines and they may have different fare rules. Generally a lot fewer Avios, however.

Paros_fan

I once had a 2 day trip to Azerbaijan and had a similar issue. I just booked 1 trip with the outbound when I needed and the inbound for about 1 month later. I then booked a single one way for the return journey.
WT:
Return + oneway = about £600-700 total
Return without Saturday night = about £1600

Obviously, don't make a habit of this. But I simply called and cancelled my other inbound one week before stating I had a change in business plans.

jdw111

Thanks guys - and thanks for the warm welcome.

I didn't think it would be easy. I also need to be in Berlin at the weekend, but that didn't help reduce the ticket price. Mad that BA are willing to lose so much custom this way.

Cheers anyway!

MillionMileMarker

Not sure what your current status is but if you're really keen to bulk up your avios and TP balance then I would suggest flying with a different airline as you'll get 2x long haul TP's with a stopover.

If you don't have status yet you also won't lose out on any status bonusses BA might give you.

Watch out for Qatar though where the avios earning is very poor in discounted economy.

Globaliser

No, it's not mad. And BA doesn't really care that much how many customers it loses. What BA cares about is how much money it banks.

Business passengers who can't stay a Saturday night are the engine room of the airline's profitability. Most have no option but to pay the fares that don't require a Saturday night stay.

So suppose that the rule means that BA loses half of these passengers. If the rule were abolished, BA would carry twice as many people. But (on the numbers that you quote) each would be paying a quarter of the previous price (given that the lower price would probably match the competition's lower price). So BA gets only half of the money that it used to get. It's more profitable for BA to carry fewer passengers at the higher fare.

No, it's not mad at all.

Swiss Tony

No, I think the pricing in this instance is mad.

LHR-MNL-LHR via HKG using BA & CX is £2k out on May 11, back on May 14

Now, if you tack on a LHR-AMS flight on May 17, the price falls to £740 as you're now running the trip over a weekend.

(It may be even cheaper if you put another city in there - I just picked Amsterdam at random).

On the basis BA will not charge you the difference if you don't fly to Amsterdam at the end of the trip, the pricing as it stands is farcical, although if the client is a stickler for cash, surely they're just going to pack you off on China Southern or whatever for £370.

Globaliser

But virtually nobody is going to do that. We here are specialists in finding and exploiting these pricing quirks, but out in the real world it isn't going to happen. So BA keeps raking in the money by virtue of the rule.

Calchas

Then the OP should do this and throw away his LON-AMS coupon.

I am sure BA would love to charge you the fare difference but it has probably been advised by its lawyers that would be an unwise move.

The fare rules could easily be rewritten to minimize this problem on this particular fare component.

shorthauldad

except that

so why should BA bother?

$0.02: maybe a few more FTers should just get on with picking the low-hanging fruit? Not every price needs an explanation (with apologies to 6F), and indeed BA doesn't always get it right.