Best, quietest 2-4-1 business routes before end of August
 

Looking for advice from people who have used the 2-4-1 voucher recently for business class. What are the best routes to target to use it by end of August? My child is going to hit 2 years old at end of August and I would like to be able to fly without having to purchase a ticket, but this is very last minute so trying to trawl through the availability is taking ages and coming up with not much.

Perhaps there's a good first class availability on something before then? Also any advice on how to more easily find available routing is much appreciated.

Post August info would still be useful as I could use the companion voucher for me and the child and my partner could purchase a separate ticket. We're by no means flush with money so we may be stuck to business class fare sales to achieve this so that may not be plannable at the moment.

Do you have the BA mobile app? The "Reward Flight Finder" is (I find) very helpful for this sort of broad availability search. You specify number of passengers, months of travel and class, and you can ask it to search whole regions. So e.g. I asked it to search "North America" and it comes back with the number of cities in both USA and Canada where there is availability.

You can then drill down into each country to see the number of days where there is availability in each direction, e.g. for Canada it gave me this. You need to drill into each city to see the available dates, but obviously if you see a larger number on a given city, availability is better.

For example, if you asked it to search USA, you'd see New York has 21 out/18 inbound flights with 2 Business Class seats available in August, while other cities were much less.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...9a8015e3aa.png

Have a look at rewardflightfinder.com it will show you whats available on certain dates.

Just be wary about August with the very high chance of industrial action.

Business routes are good during August. I often pop to JFK in August to take advantage of £1300 J fares

Middle East can be reasonably available in August, but that's because no-one in their right mind really want to go to Dubai in the middle of summer

Also recommend this.

Quick look shows 2x J and F availability for:
PEK
PVG

Otherwise not much reward capacity as expected ~45 days out.

No idea where you might find the availability, but you still need to buy the baby a ticket, even if it's only 10% of points and fees. Also, after she turns 2 you'd probably be better off using the 2-4-1 for yourself and your partner and buying the cash ticket for her. Might involve a phone call, but should save some decent change.

Sorry for not getting back to this. So we ultimately picked 2 destinations in the US that weren't high traffic (similar to suggestions earlier). Very helpful to know the things about the app as well, cheers. I didn't realise it can do this and have not used that feature a lot!

Didn't realise this was going on............and we missed the industrial action upon the return flight by a day or two :eek:

We wound up actually using the 2-4-1 with 2 year old as infant before the birthday and non-infant after. BA had to find the extra seat on the way back due to regulations and it wasn't a cost to our ticket beyond the 10% points and fees. This was great, but it took the people at checkin sometime to sort the whole mess out as a few calls to customer services gave us an "it'll be fine, let them sort it at checkin" and it wasn't so fine! Very, very difficult to fix the mess because we were hitting the issue of appearing to still have 2 lap infants rather than 1 lap infant 1 toddler...and that means you can't be in the same row.