A new Avios travel app for iOS – Avios Flight Finder

If you have an iPhone or iPad there is a new (beta) Avios travel app now available in the App Store – Avios Flight Finder.  It is not available on Android at the moment unfortunately.

It does what it says on the tin.  It is a fairly straightforward app that lets you search for Avios flight availability from London.  You can pick a specific month or you can have the app show you everything available.  Once you have found seats, the app drops into a version of the avios.com booking page to allow you to book your flight.

This app makes it substantially quicker to look for availability over long periods.  This is probably bad news from BA!

For example, it took me just 14 seconds from opening the app to discover that the first day that I can get 2 people to Los Angeles in Club World is Sunday January 1st 2015.  The first day I can get 2 people to San Francisco is November 25th.

Some of the findings are bizarre.  On the 4th July I can get 4 people to San Diego in Club World.  That is the ONLY day in the next 355 days, according to the app, that there are two San Diego seats in Club World available.  On December 31st, February 15th, March 17th and May 20th there is one seat.   That is to a destination which, frankly, is unlikely to be attracting floods of redemptions.

I really don’t think BA wants people to be able to discover this information in 14 seconds ….

Here are some things you should know before using it:

it is an avios.com and not BA app, so to book via the app you need to have your Avios in avios.com and not ba.com – otherwise you will need to use the normal BA website

avios.com has better availability for European economy redemptions than BA.  If you need to book one of those seats, you will need to do it via avios.com and so you wouldn’t be able to use a BA Amex 2-4-1 voucher.

the app does not appear to show avios.com partner airlines in the headline search (eg Flybe, Aurigny, Monarch, Air Malta) although it will bring up their flights during the booking process – I found Air Malta seats for example.

airports only served by partners (eg Guernsey) are not on the drop-down city list so you cannot search for them at all.  The reason Air Malta comes up is that BA also has its own flights to Malta.

it only lets you search for flights from London.  If you want to look for a one-way flight TO London you would need to pretend you wanted to fly a return trip.

the app will not show oneworld partner airline seats because you can only book those airlines via ba.com and not via avios.com

All in all, though, I was impressed – as a way of checking reward seats on British Airways flights on the go it is quick and it is easy.

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