Advice – calling at T-355 with use of Amex 241 and Barclays simultaneously
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Is anyone able to advise on whether it is possible to ring call centre at midnight T-355 days before and book 3 seats in business class for a popular route to bag these by use of both a companion and Barclays upgrade voucher in ‘one transaction’ as it were.
Am looking to potentially book to HND and will have both vouchers available to me however crucially they are in different BA accounts (although we are part of one household account). I’m just not sure whether the agent will be able to do it all in one booking to hold all 3 seats in one go before they get snapped up. Would be interested to know what others have managed to do in this situation. Thanks
Can you not just log on to the respective accounts on different devices and book them online?
Can you not just log on to the respective accounts on different devices and book them online?
For popular route like this, unless you are lucky, by the time your reach payment page online someone on the phone would have snagged the seats as phone line gets priority.
Think if you read the book T-355 thread, can’t combine the two. Likely to missing out on seat 3
Even if they can they will need both vouchers holders on the call, you can’t use another household member’s voucher (unless you have set some sort of pre authorisation to speak on their behalf).
If you have a HHA, you can set yourself up as an authorised person on the other accounts and make transactions on their behalf. Whether BA can do this simultaneously on the phone, I don’t know.
Thanks for your replies. Is anyone aware of any way around this?
It’s sounding like the only workaround for a guaranteed seat is to use the 241 and then pay the full whack of avios on a single reward seat to have it all done by one phone agent in one booking. I presume you are not able to retrospectively apply a Barclays voucher to an avios seat that has already been booked.
And yes, I was expecting those HND seats will go like hot potatoes which is why I wouldn’t feel confident booking it online, especially as I’d have to go through the process twice for separate bookings in my HHA. The seats will almost definitely be gone
I called recently at 1am to use a 241, an upgrade voucher and I needed two full price avios seats. Not exact same as you since vouchers were all in my name – but it does seem that some agents might be able to process in one go, albeit separate bookings.
On the outbound, the agent said he had to deal with them one at a time – eg, take two seats from inventory, process; then take one seat from inventory. Process. In fact, at 1am no seats to SIN were released at all due to IT glitch, but they dropped into the system (in bulk) a few days later so I just booked online myself.
For the inbound I called in advance (eg afternoon) to run through the permutations and combinations. The agent I spoke to helpfully said it was no problem to pull all the tickets from inventory and then process one by one. So I called at 1am, got a different agent said they had to process one by one, so I asked him to do the Barclay voucher booking while I did the others online… and of course it hit 1am and the site went down for maintenance. So again, I ended up booking some online, calling for vouchers to be applied and avios returned etc etc
Thanks for your replies. Is anyone aware of any way around this?
It’s sounding like the only workaround for a guaranteed seat is to use the 241 and then pay the full whack of avios on a single reward seat to have it all done by one phone agent in one booking. I presume you are not able to retrospectively apply a Barclays voucher to an avios seat that has already been booked.
And yes, I was expecting those HND seats will go like hot potatoes which is why I wouldn’t feel confident booking it online, especially as I’d have to go through the process twice for separate bookings in my HHA. The seats will almost definitely be gone
Workaround surely is to have the other voucher holder also call at the same time? Both of you nabbing seats with different agents simultaneously.
Yes but “player” B almost always remains disinterested especially at 1am.
Yes but “player” B almost always remains disinterested especially at 1am.
I find letting Player B know in that case they’ll be the one sat in economy usually gets them interested.
I called recently at 1am to use a 241
Which number did you use? Looking online it seems the US phone lines will close at 8pm EST so 1am UK time, so did you just call at 12.30am or something to try and speak with them before they close?
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