Did you book anything in the great Avios IT error on Tuesday?

I was in two minds about whether we should write about this, given that it will just cause a gnashing of teeth from those who missed out, but I thought we probably should.

If it makes you feel any better, all of the HfP team missed out too. We were too busy rushing out an article on the deal to book, and by the time the article was written, the deal was gone!

But let’s take a step back ….

As we’ve mentioned before, Avios availability has been messed up since British Airways started to implement a new flight pricing system on 1st July.

Before Tuesday, the most obvious sign of this was the missing Avios First Class availability, as well as various routes with virtually zero Avios availability. The latter issue has now been resolved, and some First Class availability has come back, albeit only to the end of August in many cases.

One outstanding issue is the loss of the ‘extra’ Avios availability which holders of Premium Plus American Express cards are meant to see, but that is an article for another day.

What happened on Tuesday?

Around 12.30pm on Tuesday, British Airways opened up the guaranteed level of Avios availability – 4 World / Euro Traveller, 2 World Traveller Plus and 4 Club World / Club Europe seats – on virtually all flights.

You could book pretty much anything you wanted. Cape Town for Christmas? Jump in. Tokyo for cherry blossom season next year? No problem.

Even though these flights had already released the guaranteed number of Avios seats, BA released the same number again!

It lasted for around 35 minutes.

At around 1.05pm, ALL Avios availability seemed to be pulled in an attempt to stop people booking. This has now been resolved.

Will BA cancel bookings?

If you book a fare error for cash these days, it is highly likely that the airline will cancel it. This is the main reason we don’t write about them.

The defence is that the customer should have realised that the fare was so cheap it was sold in error and can’t complain if the airline cancels it.

There is no justification for cancelling an Avios ticket sold at the standard Avios price as these seats were. BA can’t even claim that it would never release Avios seats for certain dates or certain routes, because – of course – it guarantees to release 14 seats on every long haul flight!

If you managed to book something during those 35 minutes on Tuesday, I think your ticket will be just fine.

Of course, if you are not travelling for some months, it makes no sense to make non-refundable hotel or car hire bookings immediately. Sit it out for a couple of weeks, just in case. It is highly likely that you will be able to travel, however.