miklcct

As title. The app is quoting 19000 Avios for SOU-EDI round trip off peak. I think that's ridiculous.

Isn't British Airways a good programme known for short haul flights?!

mikeyfly

Yes, if you choose to take the £0.50 option

Normal Reward flight is 9,500 + £35 off peak

Did you not continue to see the options available ?

CT-UK

Go to the more pricing options and you can see the figure you quoted has next to no cash element. Chose a figure you are happy with.

Personally if the cash fare is high I don't think 19k is ridiculous.


**mikeyfly typed quicker than me

mike turnbull

Some people just don't get it, and are just too lazy or ignorant to read any further. Stupid.

Oxon Flyer

The frequency by which this same question is posted on the forum suggests the issue is more with the way the pricing information is presented, not with the stupidity of the user.

1Aturnleft

A little visual tag next to the reward flight saver price would be a useful visual clue.... pipe dreams I fear

corporate-wage-slave

Indeed the question does come up every few weeks, though often in different guises (e.g. differences in refund costs, impacts on Companion Vouchers).

A lot can be explained by people's different approaches to "air miles" in all their different names. Many people would regard "air miles" as essentially worthless coupons, not even as useful as Green Shield Stamps, which won't buy you a coffee / beer / bag of sugar / First flight to the Maldives, when in reality Avios can in fact do all of that to some extent. These people will see "50 pence and some Monopoly notes" and think "wow this is better than paying £100" or whatever the commercial fare is.

Now the clever people in this forum know that actually Avios are valuable in certain contexts, it merely requires attributing a value to each Avios. 1 pence per Avios is often used, at which point that flight becomes £190.50, which if it is up against a £100 commercial fare doesn't stack up. But against a £250 fare it certainly does stack up. It stacks up better on the standard RFS of 9,500 Avios plus £35 = £130. If you attrribute 2 pence per Avios then 5,900 Avios plus £85 is better (£203 in all versus £380.50 for the 50p option). But at the other extreme, if an Avios is 0.5p (half penny) each, then 9.500 is still the best option (£82.50).

If you attribute 2 pence an Avios you risk never using them. Half penny an Avios is less than BA's internal maths so that doesn't make sense either, so using 1 penny per Avios is a very good and easy rule.

I had a last minute flight earlier this week, the cheapest LHR-NCL was £238 in ET, around £350 in CE. Avios still available (thanks to the extra inventory for Gold members) so I ended up paying £47.50 and 7250 Avios for a flight arranged within 24 hours of departure in CE. Absolute bargain for a must-do flight.

cameramaker

I wanted to UUA this morning, LHR-IBZ. 3 J seats available, but I couldn’t do it online as it was a Holidays booking. BAH line closed last night and this morning. The check in agent quoted me 16,875 avios each to upgrade. I asked if they could price as per the RFS rates and charge me the TFC difference, but apparently this wasn’t possible. A supervisor was called who also had little idea about avios upgrades and just said what the agent had said.

Is this correct that the airport can’t process RFS?

sammyg901

Yes. I think they were quoting you a cash price converted into avios at a terrible value, not a UuA. They can only be done by the exec club call centre

_nate

Honestly, it's annoying the way things are presented right now. I can understand how someone unfamiliar with the programme, especially in the absence of any published charts, might simply try a booking and assume the number of Avios presented was correct rather than kind of arbitrary.

That said, I like the option to pay different rates. It works for me as I can optimise it, and it works for infrequent fliers who don't use the scheme much as they can put as much of their Avios as possible towards one flight and not leave Avios wasting away. The booking page doesn't show options you can't afford by default iirc, so it shows them the best way to use their whole stack at once if they are trying to do so.

BLHD

BAH Duty Office for something like this on the day of departure