British Airways launched its Autumn premium cabin sale yesterday. Flights are bookable until 12th November.
What is interesting about the sale is that you can book until September 2016 on many routes – a substantially larger window than usual. The absolute latest date is 15th October 2016 for Tampa, Orlando and Lima.
It is important to note that there are black-out days on many routes – see the terms and conditions on the offer page. These are generally based on specific days of the week being blocked off rather than continual periods of time.
Full sale details can be found on ba.com here.
The key question, of course, is “are the prices any good?”.
In some cases, the answer is definitely “yes”.
It isn’t often you find Club World fares at £1,500 from London, but this price is available for:
- Boston
- Calgary
- Chicago
- Miami
- Montreal
- New York
- Philadelphia (£1,353)
- Toronto
- Vancouver
- Washington
- Cancun
- Kingston (£1,291)
- Punta Cana (£1,290)
- San Jose Costa Rica
- Abu Dhabi
- Amman (£1,320)
- Bahrain
- Beirut (£1,229)
- Cairo (£1,351)
- Dubai
- Lagos
- Tel Aviv (£1,125 – but First is better value at £1,187)
- Bangalore
- Chennai
- Mumbai
- New Delhi
Other routes are also available – albeit for more than £1,500 – with South Africa being the major destination to be excluded completely. First Class is generally available for an additional £1,000 return.
Before you book, you should try two additional things which may make your trip even cheaper:
Price the same route starting in Dublin. It will occasionally be cheaper, although you need to factor in the cost of getting to Dublin and back. Shanghai, for example, is just €1,200 (£866) over Christmas and New Year.
Try using the ‘flight and hotel’ or ‘flight and car’ option on ba.com. If you don’t need a hotel, only get a quote for a hotel or car for one night and pick the cheapest one possible. Due to the way BA prices these products, it can work out cheaper than just booking a flight. You are under no obligation to pick up the car or stay in the hotel – your return flight won’t be cancelled!
One other benefit of booking a ‘flight and hotel’ or ‘flight and car’ package is that you don’t need to pay for your trip now. You can pay a small deposit, from £150, and settle the balance nearer to your travel date.
(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
Depends what means value to you & your family.
Avios RFS Europe is all I’m interested in.
Can’t see there being any better deals any time soon as everything has been devaluing all year! I have only been saving since Jan but will convert the whole lot over to use with future 2-4-1’s to the USA.
Well as mentioned above I cancelled my CW flight over Easter on a 2 4 1 voucher redemption and booked sale price from Dublin to Mia via London, I didn’t fancy the 757 product from Dub to PHL so paid about 15 Euros more to go on the A380 from Heathrow! Return would have been £880 but oddly they tempted me for an extra £300 on the return to book into First. No brainer really £450 for outward in CW and £750 to return in First! 100,000 avios recovered plus another 60,000 earnt for the two of us and 410 tier points each plus £1,1000 refund. I think it was a good decision on this occasion compared to our voucher redemption we cancelled.
I think this was unquestionably a no brainer. Had you booked your new flights just in CW, you probably would be saving at least £1000 in avios, 241 voucher, tier points etc. Even booking one of your flights in F, I think you are still coming a few hundred quid ahead of what you had – and you get to fly F!
Has anyone else noticed a big shift from Thursday? YYZ returns for the whole of May were £1450. They seemed to have disappeared.
something isnt making sense at BA.com right now. Those £1450 fares become £3090 around 5th June which itself seems crazy to me. So I tried Flight+hotel for a trip later in June – and in the example I looked at, its £100 cheaper to book with the Intercontinental Hotel directly and buy the flights standalone, instead of using Flight+hotel. Way to go BA.
So I have DUB-MCO via PHL booked for 25 March. Really don’t fancy the 757 on American. Fares I was looking at yesterday have gone it seems. Anyone got any suggestions as to how I can get myself routing via LHR and not on American? I just can’t get the matrix to work- it just keeps throwing up BA codeshares on American.
I’m looking at the flight + Hotel option but don’t see anything that suggests I pay just a deposit now and the balance later. In fact it says “Clicking “Book and pay” will confirm your booking and charge your payment card.” How do you defer payment here?