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@AmyC glad you liked the Feathered Nest. Not a real mosquito, just seemed so small – I think it’s a Cessna 172. Thank you re Cotswolds, we will try that as well as Alderney. We like Compton Abbas which is a bit different and my brother lives quite near. I was taken to Bembridge on the IoW for Father’s Day which was great; nice walk up to the monument and pub at the top!
Yes 172 is the standard craft I fly in. Although to Cotswolds it was a Piper. Is your son going to go commercial or keep it a hobby?
We dissuaded him from doing commercial training! I think he’s quite pleased about that now seeing friends paying for all the training themselves then still not getting great jobs.
Ahhh but has he seen this https://careers.ba.com/future-pilots
@AmyC glad you liked the Feathered Nest. Not a real mosquito, just seemed so small – I think it’s a Cessna 172. Thank you re Cotswolds, we will try that as well as Alderney. We like Compton Abbas which is a bit different and my brother lives quite near. I was taken to Bembridge on the IoW for Father’s Day which was great; nice walk up to the monument and pub at the top!
Yes 172 is the standard craft I fly in. Although to Cotswolds it was a Piper. Is your son going to go commercial or keep it a hobby?
We dissuaded him from doing commercial training! I think he’s quite pleased about that now seeing friends paying for all the training themselves then still not getting great jobs.
Ah but has he seen this…. https://careers.ba.com/future-pilots
I plan to gift the silver to one of the kids so they can choose seats in CW while I’m in F. Unless GGL or the GUF tickets allow seat selection, I can’t seem to find an answer to this.
Firstly I just wanted to say I have really enjoyed reading this thread.
On the specific question above, I was flying with my partner recently on the same flight but separate bookings – I have gold and they have blue – and the gold line was able to do seat selection for both of us – they couldn’t do it ‘live’ but sent the request to another department who did the seat selection within a day or two – seemed to be a standard process.
Aslong as they are travelling in the same cabin a gold can request seats for other people on separate bookings. It’s a standard and listed gold benefit.
However unlike people on the same booking they don’t get the extra baggage allowance a gold has etc.
Is it fairly easy to get through to BA Holidays? I might be going to take a deep breath and try and book an 8-sector trip for next year for 640 TPs!
Not quite answering the question, but I was astonished that I was able to book one of these multi hop double TP trips as an 8 leg 5 hotel night trip just using the Custom Trip tool – didn’t need to call BA, which I’d initially assumed would be the case.
Also, as you’re Silver, you should be able to call the Silver line to book as a custom Flight and Hotel combo if it’s too complex for the online tool?
Thanks – can I ask what the itinerary was? I can price up 6 separate legs but if I try, for example, to have MAN-LHR-EDI as one flight, the system doesn’t seem to like it and gives me an error message. @Angela above mentioned some issue that means that you have to get an agent to sort out so I assumed it was that.
I thought only BA Holidays could book these so good shout re the Silver line!
It it beneficial to live near LHR for these multisegement runs or not?
Thanks – can I ask what the itinerary was? I can price up 6 separate legs but if I try, for example, to have MAN-LHR-EDI as one flight, the system doesn’t seem to like it and gives me an error message. @Angela above mentioned some issue that means that you have to get an agent to sort out so I assumed it was that.
I thought only BA Holidays could book these so good shout re the Silver line!
So, I managed to book the following for March 2024
LHR-OTP
1night hotel
OTP-NCL via LHR
1 night hotel
NCL-SOF via LHR
1 night hotel
SOF-LHR
1night hotel
LHR-ATH
2 nights hotel
ATH-LHR1120 TPS
But with BA IT being reliably unreliable , difficult to guarantee what can be booked successfully without calling!
I could never get the custom tool on BA to work for me. But BA can do this using a bypass function on their system.
@vetjames I think I don’t think it matters where you start your journey in the UK.Thanks – can I ask what the itinerary was? I can price up 6 separate legs but if I try, for example, to have MAN-LHR-EDI as one flight, the system doesn’t seem to like it and gives me an error message. @Angela above mentioned some issue that means that you have to get an agent to sort out so I assumed it was that.
I thought only BA Holidays could book these so good shout re the Silver line!
So, I managed to book the following for March 2024
LHR-OTP
1night hotel
OTP-NCL via LHR
1 night hotel
NCL-SOF via LHR
1 night hotel
SOF-LHR
1night hotel
LHR-ATH
2 nights hotel
ATH-LHR1120 TPS
But with BA IT being reliably unreliable , difficult to guarantee what can be booked successfully without calling!
Nice trip! If it isn’t rude to ask, what was the cost / cost per TP?
@vetjames, this is actually one scenario where there’s an advantage to being in the regions because of the opportunities to get 80 TPs from very short domestic connections.
@nectar collector, thanks, I will digest that later!
@Niall, I have managed to price up 6 segments plus 10 days’ car hire in Porto for just over £1k which I thought was very reasonable. All domestic flights apart from LGW-OPO. So £1.60 per TP, if I’ve done the maths correctly, although I’ll probably pay a bit more to get a bigger car, which will up the cost a bit. We’ll actually need the car for the whole OPO part of the trip though, so it’s not a big deal.That reminds me, I need to check whether we can hire a car in Portugal and take it into Spain!
Thanks – can I ask what the itinerary was? I can price up 6 separate legs but if I try, for example, to have MAN-LHR-EDI as one flight, the system doesn’t seem to like it and gives me an error message. @Angela above mentioned some issue that means that you have to get an agent to sort out so I assumed it was that.
I thought only BA Holidays could book these so good shout re the Silver line!
So, I managed to book the following for March 2024
LHR-OTP
1night hotel
OTP-NCL via LHR
1 night hotel
NCL-SOF via LHR
1 night hotel
SOF-LHR
1night hotel
LHR-ATH
2 nights hotel
ATH-LHR1120 TPS
But with BA IT being reliably unreliable , difficult to guarantee what can be booked successfully without calling!
Nice trip! If it isn’t rude to ask, what was the cost / cost per TP?
Based on the total cost it priced out at £1.38 per TP, for 1120TPs for each of the two of us travelling. But I also opted to use 12000 Avios to then reduce the price by £120.
@Angelamc11 Can you give us an overview of how you get ~4000 tier points for £3000. Where are you going?It appears the more segments you have on a booking the cheaper the flights become. I’ve a few B2B Sofia at 320 points for around £210. I’ve several domestics between £50 and £60 for 80 points. Bookings with 8 or 10 segments have the cheapest flights with only one car hire element. Some of these come in at around £700 for 960 points, but they are a lot of work with very early morning flights, late evening flights and 3 flights in a day.
The trick is getting them booked a soon as the sale lands so you have lots of choice on the dates and times before the seats sell and prices goes up.
Using the ITA matrix and playing around with dates throws up some really cheap fares. Then I found when booking with BA and giving the booking classes as per the ITA matrix, it was working out around £100 less than the matrix was quoting.
For example, I would book 6 or 4 segments on the phone. Then phone back within 24 hours and add 4 more segments, this always seemed to reduce the price down to around £50/£60 per flight even though they were showing at around £80 on the ITA matrix.
Because I’m taking the hire car home I don’t have hotel costs or have to be away unnecessarily.
I also spent full days playing with the ITA matrix to produce flight combinations at the cheapest prices, switching dates and UK/DUB airports.
I’ve nothing helpful to add but just wanted to say you are some form of genius and I wish I had your brain. ITA matrix just sends my brain into a meltdown and I end up on google flights in a massive sulk re my limitations 😩[/quote]
how do you see domestic business return for 50? only see 50 GBP for 40 tier points..
It’s a bit difficult to quantify price per TP on a BA holiday though, as the car/hotel is going to be part of the cost.
So, I managed to book the following for March 2024
LHR-OTP
1night hotel
OTP-NCL via LHR
1 night hotel
NCL-SOF via LHR
1 night hotel
SOF-LHR
1night hotel
LHR-ATH
2 nights hotel
ATH-LHR1120 TPS
But with BA IT being reliably unreliable , difficult to guarantee what can be booked successfully without calling!
Can I ask – are these flights on consecutive days? If not I’ll invest some time in looking at multiple weekend getaways with a week back home between each.
Thanks
It’s a bit difficult to quantify price per TP on a BA holiday though, as the car/hotel is going to be part of the cost.
Agreed, it’s difficult todo based on just the flight price when it’s wrapped in a BAH, but was very happy with £1.38 based on all-in cost. I think the flight-only cost based on ITA Matrix pricing was around £1270 , so that would be £1.13 ish per TP
Is it fairly easy to get through to BA Holidays? I might be going to take a deep breath and try and book an 8-sector trip for next year for 640 TPs!
I put together an 8 leg trip on ITA for 720, called BA gold and they could not book it even though I gave flight numbers and dates! It kept falling over on the 3rd leg jfk/lax, TBF to agent I emailed her my trip but she came back not bookable and even checked with her manager so good luck. Then tweaked and tried to spit it into AA booking and again it fell over. More than a tad frustrating as TP was just under 1.70 per TP
So, I managed to book the following for March 2024
LHR-OTP
1night hotel
OTP-NCL via LHR
1 night hotel
NCL-SOF via LHR
1 night hotel
SOF-LHR
1night hotel
LHR-ATH
2 nights hotel
ATH-LHR1120 TPS
But with BA IT being reliably unreliable , difficult to guarantee what can be booked successfully without calling!
Can I ask – are these flights on consecutive days? If not I’ll invest some time in looking at multiple weekend getaways with a week back home between each.
Thanks
Yes, in this case it’s consecutive days, so 6 nights away altogether
Well I just posted about the great 7-sector itinerary I managed to book, but it seems to have gone into moderation!
Is it fairly easy to get through to BA Holidays? I might be going to take a deep breath and try and book an 8-sector trip for next year for 640 TPs!
I put together an 8 leg trip on ITA for 720, called BA gold and they could not book it even though I gave flight numbers and dates! It kept falling over on the 3rd leg jfk/lax, TBF to agent I emailed her my trip but she came back not bookable and even checked with her manager so good luck. Then tweaked and tried to spit it into AA booking and again it fell over. More than a tad frustrating as TP was just under 1.70 per TP
Likely the JFK-LAX was a married segment to the transatlantic. With BA on the phone you can near guarantee that no matter what you ask they’ll be booking BA codeshares on AA flights. Often the JFK-LAX availability is different when married to a BA code on the transatlantic than an AA code. I’ve had to HUCA when agents have claimed they can’t book AA codes, they can, but frequently won’t.
Then again if a holiday you need the BA flight numbers for double TP.
Well I just posted about the great 7-sector itinerary I managed to book, but it seems to have gone into moderation!
Congrats! Looking forward to seeing what you’ve got 🙂
So happy!
Managed to get the following booked online just now, despite the odd bat-sh1t crazy error message, e.g. “You have selected more cars than people” 😯
MAN-LHR-LYS
LYS-LHR-MAN
LGW-OPO
OPO-LGW
LGW-GLA560 TPs for a smidge over £1400 but that does include 9 days’ hire of a decent car. Haven’t decided how long to spend in Scotland at the end but can easilt get the remaining 40TPs for Silver at a later date.
Will have an expiring Ambassador free night so have used it for a weekend at the Hotel de Dieu in Lyon.Thanks, @Angela!
Out of HFP jail at last!
I can’t describe the thrill of selecting 7 seats one after the other on the same booking 😂😂😂
*The car element was bugging me so I checked and it would have been £456 to book via BA. So £1k for 540 TPs. £1.85 per TP, happy with that.
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