TTmex

A friend is about to purchase economy tickets to Valencia from Mexico. Flights can be purchased for same price on BA and IB.

The operating carrier is IB. Is there any benefit to booking through one or the other?

craigthemif

If you book a codeshare you will struggle to select seats, etc. Rarely a good idea...

JessicaB

If you are trying to buy using Avios, then it's much more expensive to buy via BA.com but much easier if you need to cancel or change the flights. Iberia's website is atrocious and any changes or refunds usually involve having to call. Their English-speaking staff are few and far between in my experience so unless you speak Spanish, go down the BA route. If it's just a cash purchase, and if you are not likely to want to refund or change anything, then booking via Iberia.com is probably best as you will find it easier to choose your seats.

One other hint. On Iberia, they cannot through-check luggage unless all flights are on the same booking. Even if you are on an Iberia transferring to Iberia, they won't be able to through-check the bags unless both flights are on the same booking.

Iberia does usually have far better reward availability than BA in my opinion, and I think their Business product is superior to BA's Club, especially since all seats have aisle access.

TTmex

Thank you. I'll pass it on to him. He's fluent in Spanish, so no issues on that front. But yes, I think it makes more sense to book direct with the airline he's flying with. He's got no status or anything else, either.

Appreciate the responses.

flyslow

Does that apply only to long haul J seats? I made reward booking LPA-MAD in Y and IIRC it was same amount of Avios on both BA and IB, cash component was lower when booked via BA, though not by much. So now I have 125- ticket with IB flight number on I2 metal. No issues selecting a seat on rj.com

HIDDY

I'd stick with booking through IB as well. In the past we have used IB.com for our EZE-MAD sectors and BA for the MAD-LHR-GLA sectors when flying BA or vice versa....we stopover in MAD.

When using Avios, in my experience they are the same cost on both sites anyway so I'm not quite sure why JessicaB thinks otherwise.

JessicaB

I book SDQ - MAD - LHR regularly using Avios. It's the same amount of Avios on BA and Iberia's websites, but the "taxes" are around £120 on Iberia and around £300 on BA.com. I'm not booking a codeshare, it's all on Iberia metal. I pay the extra to book on BA.com because I often want to change my flights, or cancel them. I can do this easily on BA.com and if I book with Iberia.com to make any changes you have to call them, and the quickest I've ever managed to do a change is 1 hour and 30 minutes, most of which was spent on hold. The other thing is that I have a Household account and if I cancel the flight with Iberia, it's very hard to get Avios back into my BA account. I just think that £180 extra to avoid all that stress is worth it.

1Aturnleft

For £100, I'll gladly hold in line and process the refund with IB on your behalf.

TTmex

Yes, transatlantic on IB metal can be good value when compared to BA. It's the taxes/carrier fees that vary.

When it comes to UuA, Iberia is abysmal, BA really quite good IMO.

As for moving Avios around, it's actually very simple. As long as you have an avios.com account (opened with aerlingus or vueling) can be very simple to shift them around once everything is linked up. Takes 20 secs to transfer from one to other, then another 20 secs to BA. It works well for me. I spend Jan-Dec building BBVA points and then shift them in December when Iberia does a 1-1 offer instead of the usual 2 BBVA for 1 avios. Last year cashed in 70,000 avios thanks to this. Have already, thanks to some promos, reached 20k points Jan and Feb. Aiming to get over 100k this year by paying school and university fees at the right time, i.e. during triple point promos etc.