This is, if you look at it logically, a slightly crazy offer. British Airways is giving FREE SEATS for children with pretty much no restrictions, an offer which could cost it dearly if there is a strong take up.
Until November 1st, kids fly free when an adult buys a ticket between Leeds Bradford and Heathrow or Newcastle and Heathrow.
Up to THREE children can fly for free when an adult buys a ticket! A child is anyone aged between 2 and 11.
You can find more information here.
The only ‘catch’ is that your booking must be a point-to-point flight and cannot connect to another flight on the same ticket. Nothing stops you booking an onward flight separately.
This is a bit silly, to be honest. For a Saturday in October I checked, a one-way ticket for one adult and three children to Leeds Bradford costs £58. For four people. That is £14.50 each!
There appear to be no restrictions on the offer. You pick a date, one way or return, book the cheapest possible ticket, and you won’t be charged for your children. It is not clear if the free tickets for your children earn Avios points or not, although you would need a Household Account to claim them anyway.
(If you were very sneaky, an adult travelling solo could book two seats for children who later no-show and get himself two empty adjacent seats ….)
Full details of the offer, including the terms and conditions, can be found on this special page at ba.com.
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for the latest articles on earning and spending your points and click here to see our list of current Avios promotions.)
About Head for Points
So they are looking after the regions after all! Great thinking there Rob! Is this useful for you going up north to the mum? Or coming down to London? actually quite nice for family trips. Are these flights empty or what?
Well some regions.
Not Midlands, South West, Wales, Eat Anglia ….
Well, you’d be a bit daft to fly from East Anglia to London…
I’ve flown LHR-MAN-NWI before 🙂
…N. Ireland
Perhaps an indication that these routes are under-used and are up for review? I can’t imagine why anyone would fly between Leeds-Bradford and Heathrow unless they had a connecting flight. Travelling times at both ends, flight time plus airport time exceed the point-to-point train journey time. Newcastle is more marginal as at least it has a reasonable metro connection.
Not bad if you have family near either of these cities. Must be flying empty in Y though.
I’ve flown up to Leeds before, then hired a car to drive up the the Yorkshire Dales. Very nice indeed! So there are some people who do it
It depends on your travel needs. I fly Manchester-London a lot, and Leeds-London occasionally. If you don’t want to go city centre to city centre (I usually don’t), trains are a pain.
That said, on my LHR-MAN flight last week, every passenger could have taken 3 free children and still had seats to spare.
Agree. I work in leeds and the feedback i get from long distance commuters from london is the hassle of going to LHR is too much over kings cross for a train, even though they can be priced similar. Maybe an argument for ba to consider switching the domestics to LCY if they really want to compete with the trains.
I think they’re after connecting traffic primarily. The Scottish cities have LCY flights because the journey times there do favour plane over train.
Great. BA get rid of the complimentary segment from the regions on award bookings and decide to offer this instead. If there’s only one thing worse than a flight filled with badly behaved children, it’s a flight filled with badly behaved Geordie children. 🙂 I can only hope that this offer has something to do with the new baggage policy and the little humans are packed safely in the overhead bins 🙂
Not sure that following Rob’s ‘sneaky’ suggestion is a good idea – no doubt BA would cotton on quite quickly to the plan and would pull the offer, meaning that people who actually want to fly with children, rather than just being selfish and/or obese, won’t be able to take advantage.
Not one of Rob’s finest hours.
Funny I thought of doing exactly what Rob had mentioned in his “sneaky suggestion” all by myself.
If I’m capable of thinking it, I’m sure plenty of other savvy travellers will too.
I don’t doubt it. It’s not the following that I personally find a bit dodgy. Still, each to his own. If these flights are running empty, it’s not an issue. If one is preventing other paying passengers from getting a seat at a reasonable price (I assume BA puts up prices as seats become scarcer on any particular flight), then it’s not something I’d do myself.
I guess these routes are in the ‘not worth keeping’ category, and will eventually be dropped.
I fly LBA to LHR on a semi regular basis and I’ve found most flights to be reasonably full. Although I do concede that Sunday night down to LHR is probably more popular than midweek.
hope they don’t decide to pull it. Or perhaps it’s less full than previously due to the high cost of taking a domestic connection on an award ticket!
LBA has an aer lingus regional flight to DUB at similar prices. I would expect either this or the BA LHR flight to be scrapped once the takeover is complete.
I thought you only had 2 kids Raffles, not 3? Or is that an awkward conversation you still need to have with your wife? 😉
Who knows how many are knocking around 🙂 ?
So BA prices domestics out of the rewards market at 9000 avios + £35 for a £50 return cash fare. Then its solution to resolve all of the excess capacity is to run buy one get three free promotions. Crazy.
Sorry meant £90 return.
In some perverse world, couldn’t this be argued as discriminatory? So if you happen to have 3 children then you can buy 4 seats for the price of one, but if you don’t have 4 children your price is 4 seats for the price of 4.
A very odd offer indeed
As for intentionally booking two unused seats, how would you guys feel should the need to make a last minute flight for family reasons occur, there being either not enough availability for your whole family group or be split up across the aircraft, all so some selfish *#*! can sit there smugly. I thought this site existed to help others maximise their travel from the airline companies, not get one over on their fellow travellers.
Kind of agree with you on this one Paul, the NCL to LHR is leas than an hour, I’m sure anyone can manage to actually sit next to someone else for that length of time 🙂
As for these routes being up for the chop, my limited experience of flying NCL to LHR (admittedly only around 3 times a year) the flights have always been full – less the odd couple of seats. I think BA do 3 flights day on this route so they can’t be that under utilised…
What Berk came up with this idea? Proves BA has no idea whatsoever. Of course people are going to take advantage of this and book “empty” seats for themselves. And only point-to-point? No “point” to that whatsoever. If these flights are under utilised, giving seats to kids for free along with all the necessary kids baggage is only going to delay flights, decrease margins and annoy fellow pax. And as a parent I know how many “essential” things kids simply must take.
Makes me feel like shoving that damn dropped teddy up BA`s rear. On that subject, BA – 2 things:
Try and repair the monitors on the aircraft used on the domestics.
Shorten that darn safety video. The FAs have turned to zombies standing there waiting for that garbage to finish.
I have a question. I was planning on taking up this offer by flying my son back to NCL from LHR. But he won’t be on the return flight? Do you think they would do anything?
Spoke to BA to check and they said he must be on both legs, if not, there could be a penalty? Has anyone seen these penalties being enforced? If I do them separately, the price shoots up!
Thanks
Will
Normally I wouldn’t worry about it. The airlines count with no-shows, after all. Book on a credit card. Only recently has BA threatened to come after people who don’t use the final leg, but these peeps are doing long-haul ex-EU to avoid APD and bag a much better fare. I`m sure there are hundreds of people who genuinely miss their flight worldwide every day, be that outbound or return…. BA would very quickly loose what reputation it has left if it came after everyone who missed their return leg wanting to reprice it to a single fare.
No, you’ll be fine.
Thanks both. I’ll book it up!