memesweeper

I’ve got two of my highly lucky family in F on an inbound to London sector. Unfortunately we’re a group of five and currently no availability on my flight for any more. Given I’ve got over six months before flying to check, is there any pattern to timing of release of further F seats? Eg 00:01 GMT like the guaranteed seats at T-355? Or could it be any time of day or night, weekday or weekend? I’m currently slightly obsessively checking as if we can’t get at least three in to F I’ll miss the lounge in JFK.

BARedemptionFinder won’t work as there is availability on other flights on that day in F (and of course none of them have five seats available) and I cannot constrain it to just one specific flight. So manual checking seems to be the only way.

teledude

It's random I'm afraid so keep checking....if it's just the CCR you're after maybe take a look at BA97 to see if anyone can help?

memesweeper

well, I'm embarrassingly late to that party! thanks for the heads up @teledude , I've registered ... and I'll keep looking for seats too, if the reward availability is there I'll jump on it...

skippythelizard

Maybe it’s worth signing up for ExpertFlyer?

In the past, when I’ve received EF alerts for BA award space, midnight GMT has been the time (convenient for me, as I’m usually in the US)..

Oddly, I got an EF alert at 10am EDT this last Saturday...and sure enough there was availability. I know it wasn’t a fluke because I had manually checked after the usual time the previous night.

Globaliser

EF checks periodically, so any particular pattern of alert times is likely to be due as much as anything to EF's checking cycle. As we know, BA does update award inventory at midnight GMT, so EF's cycle coincides with BA's inventory release then you can get told quite quickly. But if there's a miss for some reason, then you might not see the alert straight away.

skippythelizard

I understand that. To clarify...my point was that I had manually checked the night before...after midnight GMT...there was no availability. The following day, I was very surprised to get an EF alert indicating availability midday.

ringingup

Just to clarify... when you say midnight GMT, are you actually saying 1 AM current time (BST)?

When we are in BST, seats get released at 1 AM UK local time.

Globaliser

I think that inventory does sometimes appear at odd times of the day, and not always at midnight GMT. For example, if someone cancels an award reservation and the seats go straight back into award inventory, that can happen in the middle of the day.

corporate-wage-slave

Also, it isn't always on the dot of midnight GMT (though it often is). It sometimes takes a few more minutes to come live.

memesweeper

Thanks for the tips. I’m using the mobile phone browser interface and hitting the ‘continue booking’ button, as this seems to trigger a fresh search each time. When I’m bored of this I’ll fork out for the Expert Flyer sub :-)

ringingup

I got a notification today at 6 pm that two Avios seats in First had opened up for a flight to CPT I was monitoring.

P.S. I called straight away and got myself moved from CW to First!