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

[bennymoon]

NorthernLass wrote:

With somewhere as in demand as HND you need to be prepared to be flexible – can you return home from a different airport and get a connecting flight there? Would you accept seats in a lower cabin? Can you wait a couple of months and see if your companion voucher opens up more availability (including from the regions)?

Might have to but when it’s a companion voucher booking and you only have enough Avios for the return trip for two people with the voucher, another airport may not be an option (unless I wanted to fly out of Japan to get the return journey as an open jaw from somewhere else.

CJD wrote:

Call centre agents get targeted on all manner of metrics, if they’re being strictly targeted on their average handling time then they’re not going to sit and chat for 2 minutes when that’s 2 minutes they could be helping someone else.

I get that, but as said before, I was through to someone at 23:58. By the time they would have asked me the security questions, loaded up my booking and searched for the flights I wanted, it would be 00:00. It’s not like we’d be sat there twiddling our thumbs for 5/10 minutes. If it was 23:50 I’d get it. Also those metrics probably include being nice to their customers who want to spend their money with BA. When the agent advised me to book the inbound as a one way and link the bookings together, I said I didn’t have enough Avios for that and they bluntly replied “that’s a shame”. I am fully intending to make a complaint once the booking is complete about this specific agent as their attitude stunk. I thought I was asking for something quite reasonable which other agents had done for me in the past.

Anyway, tried again last night and did get through to someone but the systems were down until 6am. Annoyingly the flight I wanted was still there and was showing as available a few mins later but I do not have enough Avios to buy it as a one-way and claim back later. In the end found a Finnair flight two days earlier before we wanted to originally come back so bought that – maybe it will be fun to try out Finnair’s no recline business class.