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

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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 ….

Avios flights

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.

Avios flights

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.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (92)

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
    24 Jul24 July 10:11

    Would BA have rather sold these seats for cash then yes.

    But they are still getting a huge wodge of cash from IAGLoyalty for these flights.

    IAGL gets multi-millions of avios off their books.

    And it’s likely a number of these bookings will have already been cancelled by the booker because since they booked yesterday they’ve found out they can’t get the time off work or their travel companions can’t and so on. And those numbers will likely go up in the next few days.

    BA also gain from the glow of a number of happy passengers who now have avios flights booked when they didn’t before,

    Reply
    • ChrisBCN says:
      24 Jul24 July 10:52

      In addition, does BA have the capability of knowing which bookings made in the timeslot were from the standard avíos availability vs the extra availability.

      Not difficult to work out, but…

      Reply
      • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
        24 Jul24 July 15:18

        Someone is probably annoyed but it’s one of those things that will take longer to reverse in terms of cancelling flights and processing refunds that makes it impractical.

        Plus the bad feeling it would leave with those people.

        Reply
  • John says:
    24 Jul24 July 10:34

    Off topic… but why is Aer Lingus allowed to truncate its Avios booking window to >6 weeks prior to travel? It’s totally against the spirit of the flexibility afforded by miles redemptions. On their LON-DUB routes they are essentially pushing all business travellers onto BA.

    Reply
  • As says:
    24 Jul24 July 11:04

    Instead of articles like this which are of little use to most of us, when are you intending on publishing the promised articles re: alternatives to BA Club?

    Reply
    • Rob says:
      24 Jul24 July 11:09

      Good question, we don’t know. We are badly squeezed for resources at the moment as you can possibly tell from the odd errors that have crept in over the last couple of weeks. Four and half people is nowhere near enough for the scale of operation we run now when not all of them are around, which is most of the time ….

      However, in simple terms:

      Economy: Malaysia, Royal Jordanian (best for segment qualification)
      Premium Economy: look at Iberia
      Business: Finnair, RJ, Qatar (Qatar needs 4 Qatar segments per year)

      Reply
      • flyforfun says:
        24 Jul24 July 11:14

        Congrats on growing the business! Obviously a big demand for it!

        Now, where can I send my CV in…. 😀

        Reply
      • pbcold says:
        24 Jul24 July 11:58

        I am all over the QR scheme – less expensive, superior quality.

        Reply
        • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
          24 Jul24 July 13:32

          There is a huge difference between the QR FFP and flying on QR planes!

          People want to know the pros and cons of crediting flights to QR or AY or RJ over BA and how they earn and retain status in those schemes rather than BA.

          I’m still going to fly BA LON-AMS and BER. I’m not going to do that via DOH no matter how good QR are.

          Reply
      • Inman says:
        24 Jul24 July 11:59

        You could get some guest writers in. Simple as that.

        Reply
        • Rob says:
          24 Jul24 July 12:05

          No it isn’t. We can write a news article in 15 minutes. Don’t need to farm those out.

          We refuse to let outside writers do flight or hotel reviews because readers want the same core team to do them. If Rhys tells you that something on an aircraft is the best he’s ever seen, that carries a huge amount of weight because you know how many others he has flown.

          I can also promise you that editing an article written by someone else takes almost as long as writing it yourself, especially as the bulk of the work is SEO optimisation, cropping / resizing / uploading / choosing images etc.

          Remember that a) we have a HUGE amount of incoming email and social media queries each day, b) we run multiple social channels, c) because of our credit card licensing we are obliged to constantly update a lot of older content, d) every single ad and bit of sponsored content across the site or our emails is individually sold – we use zero programmatic advertising, e) a single hotel review requires someone to be out of the office for at least three days – the recent Australia trip Rhys did was 10 days, f) we are doing multiple pieces per week for the national press, g) we speak at or attend multiple industry conferences and events each month etc.

          Even stuff like VAT returns, payroll, accounts and our FCA regulatory returns take up large chunks of time. A single request for an advertising proposal can take half a day to put together – large pitches can take a couple of days. And don’t get us started on organising events on top of this ….

          Reply
          • kevin86 says:
            24 Jul24 July 13:22

            Not meant to be a snarky response but if the current staff can’t fulfil current workload then have you considered hiring someone ?

          • Rob says:
            24 Jul24 July 13:37

            Not at the salaries we pay, no.

          • Ross says:
            24 Jul24 July 17:17

            I’m really interested in the behind the curtain story here. Could be an article itself.

            My view (that you didn’t necessarily ask for or want, I know!) is that the updating of credit card articles for new APR etc could be outsourced pretty trivially. Ditto monthly hotel deals.

            I think you are right that the core team’s availability across socials is key and should be prioritised. People love HfP because they feel like they know the team. It is literally the first thing I read in the morning, every day, and that connection is gold in a world of clickbait and AI slop.

      • lumma says:
        24 Jul24 July 15:15

        The biggest problem with RJ is that the points you end up with are difficult to redeem, versus a programme that uses Avios. There was something in the Iberia programme launch article that said crediting to Iberia could be just as easy to get the BA Silver equivilent as it was in BA before the changes (ie one Qatar business return to Asia would get you 90% of the way). I’d just like to know if that is still the case

        Reply
    • JDB says:
      24 Jul24 July 13:33

      I feel sorry for the HfP team because if and when the articles are published about alternatives to BAC, they will inevitably get a raft of negative comments as there is simply no one size fits all scheme that will suit different travel patterns, prioritisation of Avios/miles over status, specific sector qualification, eligibility or wish to earn TPs from a credit card etc.

      I’m quite surprised that some keep asking to be spoon fed when they could, without too much effort, work it out for themselves as the only person who knows their own situation. There have also been a lot of helpful readers posting their individual stories of transitioning to other schemes describing the advantages and sharing the pitfalls of various schemes.

      Reply
      • Sam says:
        24 Jul24 July 15:56

        The spoon feeding seems to be a growing problem or maybe is just more visible due to social media. I often see questions which can be answered by a simple search

        Reply
        • VR says:
          24 Jul24 July 16:07

          In the age of AI and GPTs, no search is too small. So easy to put a prompt on any of the platforms out there and get a very detailed and relevant answer.

          But still we see the spoon feeding expectation on forums like these growing more and more.

          Reply
          • meta says:
            24 Jul24 July 19:00

            If people can’t use Google, then what help is AI? And writing correct prompts requires brains and expertise otherwise it will spit out nonsense or tell you what you want to hear which may not be the best for you.

  • louie says:
    24 Jul24 July 12:36

    I saw a comment yesterday that you can get the BA App to alert you to Avios availability. I’ve not used the App before. How do you do that please?

    Reply
  • The Savage Squirrel says:
    24 Jul24 July 13:35

    Do none of you have jobs where you actually need to be doing stuff rather than checking your phone? 😉

    I’m taking it as a positive in my mind – should reduce the overall amount of Avios in circulation making it easier for me to book in future. I do NOT want to hear if you work out that it’s probably only done this by 0.0001% 😀

    Reply
  • Jo says:
    24 Jul24 July 14:06

    I managed to get an upgrade to BC LGW – Male for New Years Eve 😀. I phoned about an hour after the glitch and they said the seats were available and processed the upgrade. We had already managed to snag upgrades for the return journey on 15th Jan. Hotels to sort now 😀

    Reply
  • waistman21 says:
    24 Jul24 July 15:23

    Not on Tuesday but just managed to get CW to HND on 21st August using companion voucher :)…4 seats left

    Reply
    • Angel says:
      24 Jul24 July 16:59

      Japan in August is a burning hell

      Reply
      • Rhys says:
        24 Jul24 July 18:42

        As is Europe but that doesn’t stop half the world descending on it!

        Reply
        • meta says:
          24 Jul24 July 19:05

          Europe is not that humid and scorching as Japan. 40 degrees earlier this week in Kansai. It doesn’t stop silly Europeans and Americans picking up e.coli by trying to freshen up in one of the canals in Dontonburi.

          Reply
  • SamG says:
    24 Jul24 July 15:44

    Was on hold to move my WT+ Male-London up to CW when they shut it all down – gutted!

    Reply

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