neuman101

I am searching for AA, Iberia and BA flights from PMI to NYC on August 9th. Despite numerous cash pay flights, i see no way to find book with avios flights. All flights show business class available for cash pay.

Is there some trick? Are all flights also available to book with avios, or is it possible that none of the Iberia or BA flights allow for avios booking

12d121

Is it because avios bookings are 'reward flights' and BA only has a certain number of reward seats available for each plane? There are websites such as reward flight finder where you can easily search for availability

FlightDetective

There are only a certain amount of frequent flyer seats available on each flight. Considering it's 9 August you are looking at, it's likely all the frequent flyer seats to use points are already taken.

This is not unusual.

lon_flyer

There are a set number of Avios seats made available on all BA flights as they're released for sale (355 days before), however these can get booked quickly (on some popular routes and/or dates you have to book on the dot at midnight). Once the initial tranche have been booked there is a chance that more Avios seats will be made available, but there's certainly no guarantee of this.

A flight being available for a cash booking has little relevance to Avios seats being available unfortunately.

Greenpen

People have accumulated thousands of Avios during the covid crisis and are keen to spend them. In addition the airlines can sell all their seats and more so there are fewer redemptions available.

The redemption market does not look good at the moment but give it six months or so we’ll be back to normal.

sammyg901

A couple of the big bloggers have published posts on this recently- there is basically zero award availability, even in programs / carriers that were reliable in opening last minute seats. Flights are full, capacity is still limited on some routes and there are huge amounts of points in circulation with a lot of people chasing the same seats. BA grounded all their 747s and half (?) their A380s with only a few 787s added, that is a lot less CW/F seats in the air than pre pandemic

BA did recently add a bunch of F seats so perhaps things will loosen up. I also suspect some speculative trips will get cancelled as people realise the reality of hotel/car hire pricing in Europe/the US. No guarantee these seats will open back up as award seats

my advice is to save your points and book early for 2023 !

sammyg901

Also worth adding that in my experience IB doesn't add more seats once whatever they had on sale have gone

jeremyBA

PmI to lhr is available on 9 aug. The jfk leg is not. I have not looked lately but lhr / jfk used to have almost certain availability pre Covid but now flights are all full.

there is a new pmi usa ( not sure where ) service direct which would be worth a look.

guv1976

UA's seasonal PMI-EWR nonstop operates on August 8 and on August 10, but not on the 9th.

Daftryan

This seems to be happening again. I was just searching over the weekend for BA Avios reward flights from DFW to different place in Mexico and there were plenty. Now there are no flights available anytime, anywhere. Is anyone else having this issue? It's odd to me that everything was just find this weekend and now, on Monday, there is nothing.

guv1976

This must be some sort of glitch: I'm seeing lots of MileSAAver award seats available in both Business and Economy this week between DFW and MEX on the AA app. MileSAAver award seats should be available for redemption with Avios.

srbrenna

I had this recently booking AA. Seats showing then disappearing on ba.com despite being available as MileSAAvers on AA. I called up and they booked it that way.

count26

So do you lookup MileSAAvers availability and then call BA to book over phone? I can't find any availability on BA, its super frustrating. I have over 160K Avios.

srbrenna

That’s right. Mention that you can’t see availability on BA so that they waive the fee too.

On this occasion I has to check on AA for about a month for the availability to appear. For some reason seatspy isn’t as good.