Reply To: The ‘How to book the return leg with 2-4-1 companion voucher’ thread

[JDB]

twiglet wrote:

Hi everybody. Quick question about this topic if anyone who has done it can weigh in.

Obviously for busy routes it’s impossible to wait for the return leg to become available, and when I booked my tickets the BA call center was in meltdown.

So I booked outbound with Avios and 2-4-1 voucher. I then waited and booked return entirely with avios.

BA are now telling me they cannot simply refund half of the Avios. They must cancel the booking and rebook, with no guarantee the seats remain available.

From my twitter conversation with BA:

I understand you have 2 Club World seats booked anyways, but these would be released into availability and we can’t guarantee they will go back in as a reward seat so it is up to you whether or not you want to take that risk.

and after pushing back…

Its how the systems are built, I’m afraid. There’s no way to directly transfer the seats from one booking to another. Officially when you make a return booking, both dates are meant to be within system range. It is already more of a gesture of goodwill that we allow you to add the return on without any change fee being charged when its release

Are they talking nonsense?

Strictly speaking BA is correct as the 241 terms state the voucher must be used at the time of booking and the Avios terms that also govern the voucher say the outbound and return must be booked at the same time. However, in practice BA has generally allowed what you are trying to do but some have recently reported resistance. I think doing this has always been a process more likely to be problematic (and administratively awkward) vs calling to add the return leg.