Amending reward flights – seats back to inventory

[Scott]

Hi, I’ve seen a number of responses recently to folk asking about amending existing Avios bookings (e.g. when they had booked the first half of a 241 and wanted a return added, or combining 2 legs booked separately) and the consensus is that agents don’t actually amend an existing booking, but instead cancel it and rebook a new one. In so doing there is apparently a chance that the existing seats won’t go straight back into the available inventory, thus risking the existing booking.

What I would like to know is, has anyone ever lost out through this, i.e. you had an existing Avios booking and when you asked for a change of this nature, you ended up losing what you had originally booked?

Just curious.

[meta]

Yes, in the early days when I didn’t fully understand the policy to Mauritius. I learnt my lesson the hard way.

I think it’s more of a risk on popular routes or where there are limited flights from the UK, but also with new style vouchers it might be less of an issue.

I think checking whether there are still seats on your original outbound is good practice before calling to add return.

[Skywalker]

Same dilemma, different issue though –

I need to amend a reward flight – is there any way around the £70 amendment fee?

I would like to move us to an earlier flight, but when I try to do this online, it seems to want £70 from me.

If there is no way around it, I guess we are on the evening flight 😀

Thanks

[memesweeper]

@Skywalker you have to pay AFAIK

@Scott I think *if* the tickets you already have are part of the “guaranteed” inventory then when cancelled, they go back on sale as Avios redemption tickets. Otherwise a high risk they are not available at all.

[Rob]

You can sit it out and see if BA moves your flight time, potentially allowing a free flight move, but obviously a big risk you lose the seats.

[Scott]

Either this is just a dull thread, or it’s a very rare issue.

As there is one confirmed report it’s apparent that the issue can occur, but my feeling is that it’s really unusual otherwise I’d have expected to have seen posts about ‘lost’ reward flights.

Following on the theory by @memesweeper, I wonder what the split of reward bookings is for initial guaranteed seats vs later releases.

[NorthernLass]

You don’t see posts about lost reward flights as there are so many warnings here about it not being guaranteed that the seats will go back into the inventory!

[Scott]

NorthernLass wrote:

You don’t see posts about lost reward flights as there are so many warnings here about it not being guaranteed that the seats will go back into the inventory!

You may be right!

The reason I was wondering about it though is I do see lots of posts about adding a return to an existing outbound, but I suppose this does tend to be at D-355 which would fit with @memesweeper’s thoughts about it only being an issue for reward availability released later.

[meta]

When I lost on MRU, it was T-355 days but it was old style voucher and I think at the time there were no guarantees on number of seats available per flight.

So I think it’s a bit less of an issue now because if your seats are part of guarantee they have to go back to the inventory. However, you are never quite sure if your seats are part of guaranteed allocation for certain routes as there is more than 4 x CW seats on a route at T-355. Hence why I would be cautious on popular/limited routes.