-
I was also after an open jaw flight, with hire car in between. If I go to the BA holidays page, there is no option to book an open jaw flight with car. Is it possible to even book online for this type of trip and it count as a holiday?
Yes, via the Custom Trip page, which can be quite hard to find on the new website but it is still there.
I was also after an open jaw flight, with hire car in between. If I go to the BA holidays page, there is no option to book an open jaw flight with car. Is it possible to even book online for this type of trip and it count as a holiday?
Yes, via the Custom Trip page, which can be quite hard to find on the new website but it is still there.
For sure. It didn’t come up when I tried the search function. Do you have the link for future reference?
In my recent experience it’s a bit hit and miss. From the BA homepage select Flight + Hotel, then scroll down and look for Create custom trip – but sometimes it isn’t there!
Having just done that, copy/paste the URL doesn’t go back to the same place.
If you Google ‘BA Holidays’ you can find a remarkably similar looking page but without the Custom option.
Some good news to report. This evening I have received this email.
Dear Mr Nye,
I have further reviewed your query have credited your flights relating to booking reference LXJHVJ which you can see if you log in to your account at ba.com, please accept my apologies for any frustrations caused.
If you have any further queries, please use our online Help Centre via the following link:
https://www.britishairways.com/travel/helpcentre/public/en_gb/
Thank you for choosing British Airways and I do hope you fly with us again soon.Thank you to those on this forum who took the time to offer advice and strategies to try and address the issues I had. It is much appreciated.
So have you got your £10k worth of TPs? Hard to tell from BA’s woefully written email!
So have you got your £10k worth of TPs? Hard to tell from BA’s woefully written email!
Yes I have.
That’s a great result, well done for persisting. It would still be interesting to know what grounds BAH was relying on for denying you in the first place!
@ricknye That is good news, albeit what you should’ve received from the start. It shouldn’t be this difficult especially as BA told us these changes to the BAC “we’re making things simpler!” Yeah right!
In contrast I’ve just received the BAH Double TP for a trip booked in old money only eight days after the return flight – ah the good old days! Just as they reach the point where they’ve managed to get it working smoothly they break it again with the new rules.
In contrast I’ve just received the BAH Double TP for a trip booked in old money only eight days after the return flight – ah the good old days! Just as they reach the point where they’ve managed to get it working smoothly they break it again with the new rules.
I think that in fact both the transitional flight and BAH arrangements work fine, as does the the new BAH spend based award, it’s only mutant BAH that appear to be problematic.
That’s a great result, well done for persisting. It would still be interesting to know what grounds BAH was relying on for denying you in the first place!
It would but at this point I’m just happy to take the win.
That’s a great result, well done for persisting. It would still be interesting to know what grounds BAH was relying on for denying you in the first place!
It would but at this point I’m just happy to take the win.
A good outcome. Who did you write to with your follow-up, or did you just respond to the initial rejection?
That’s a great result, well done for persisting. It would still be interesting to know what grounds BAH was relying on for denying you in the first place!
It would but at this point I’m just happy to take the win.
A good outcome. Who did you write to with your follow-up, or did you just respond to the initial rejection?
I responded directly to britishairwaysexecutiveclub@ba.com
I also – at the suggestion of someone on this thread – sent copies of my e-ticket receipt (which showed a breakdown of the flight exc taxes and APD) to baholidays@ba.com and queries@holidays.ba.com
I’ve no idea whether anyone at BA Holidays received what I sent (there was no acknowledgement) but I was trying to work both ends of the problem as it were.
Who knows though whether any of that made the difference.
I was also after an open jaw flight, with hire car in between. If I go to the BA holidays page, there is no option to book an open jaw flight with car. Is it possible to even book online for this type of trip and it count as a holiday?
Yes, via the Custom Trip page, which can be quite hard to find on the new website but it is still there.
For sure. It didn’t come up when I tried the search function. Do you have the link for future reference?
Be careful. I used exactly that approach for exactly that scenario, and I’m being denied BAH TPs (though they haven’t actually explained why, of course – so I’ll caveat that the below is my deduction). I’ve shared my experience on Flyertalk but having found this thread I’ll do so here, in the hopes that either BA will see it and see sense (!) or at least others will not be caught out the way I seem to be right now.
As per the quote above, I needed an open-jaw trip with car hire (I booked hotels separately because BAH’s options were pretty poor for my purposes), so I clicked through Holiday types and Multi-centre holidays to get to the “create your custom trip” UI posted above
Or: https://www.britishairways.com/badp/complexItineraries/search.do?fromBAEntryPoint=true
from which I selected my flights and car. All seemed good: I got my e-ticket receipt with ATOL certificate attached, spam WhatsApps from BAH in the runup to departure, the whole works.
After the trip, however, things started to go awry. I was credited with Avios and bonus TPs for the flights within days, but no spend-related TPs, even after the 14 working day period BAH specify. Long story short: after getting on for ten contacts with BA over six weeks (via phone, e-mail, chat, X/Twitter), I finally got a reply (from BAC) telling me my booking doesn’t qualify for TPs for the whole spend and telling me to click on a link on the BAH page to figure out why. I’ve asked for an explanation, but I’m not holding my breath. And at least they have credited TPs for the net spend on the flights – so I am in a better position than some people whose stories I’ve read.
I feel pretty aggrieved by this – I followed the rules and still lost out.
BAH advertises the “TPs for whole spend” proposition on “every” holiday very heavily (unsurprisingly, as it’s one of the few good things in the new BAC regime), and advertises multi-centre holidays, the only way to book one is via the path above, and at no point in the progress of booking is there anything to warn you that you’ve stepped off the one true path. If it’s really the case that only “A to B with car and/or hotel at B” qualifies, then they need to say that clearly on the Earning tier points on holidays page. No doubt someone will point to the weasel word “eligible” in the blurb, but that’s pretty shabby in my view. Maybe it’s just broken IT and a lack of will to do something, but either way customers are left fuming (or at least this one is).
@AustinS68 do you remember (or can you check) to see if your booking confirmation shows a price breakdown between flights and car hire?
@AustinS68 do you remember (or can you check) to see if your booking confirmation shows a price breakdown between flights and car hire?
It does, and I have also read elsewhere that this appears to be the defining property of a BAH that isn’t really a BAH. But that’s just totally unfair and utter cr@p, isn’t it? You have no control over what their system spits out, and by the time the confirmation / e-ticket receipt arrives you are committed: they have your cash and you aren’t getting it back.
What galls me (most) is that there was no different path I could have taken through the booking process for this kind of trip, and no warning that it would end up being characterized as not qualifying for the heavily promoted BAH whole-booking-value TPs. I wonder if the powers that be at BA even understand this issue, let alone want to fix it.
Afterthought: Can you book these things over the phone and get them to confirm then and there that the trip qualifies? Maybe that’s the way forward.
This seems very similar to what @ricknye reported and it sounds like there’s an IT gremlin which prevents the TPs from posting and BA/H just assume that their system must be correct.
I use custom trip a lot and have never seen individual pricing for any of the elements, only extra (or reduced) amounts of money to select different cars or hotels.
Yes you can book BAH’s over the phone – in fact sometimes you have to, e.g. if you want different cabins on your flights.
@AustinS68 do you remember (or can you check) to see if your booking confirmation shows a price breakdown between flights and car hire?
It does, and I have also read elsewhere that this appears to be the defining property of a BAH that isn’t really a BAH. But that’s just totally unfair and utter cr@p, isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s nonsense and – to my simple mind – feels highly disingenuous compared to the headline TP-earning message of the BAC.
The phone booking approach could be good, but it really shouldn’t be such a delicate balance between a ‘valid’ BAH and BA’s ability to say ‘ah-ha, gotcha! Not this time, sunshine, no nice TPs for you.’ I sense BA’s default is to find any possible way to avoid awarding TPs. Every point a prisoner, appears to be BA’s mindset.
This seems very similar to what @ricknye reported and it sounds like there’s an IT gremlin which prevents the TPs from posting and BA/H just assume that their system must be correct.
I use custom trip a lot and have never seen individual pricing for any of the elements, only extra (or reduced) amounts of money to select different cars or hotels.
Yes you can book BAH’s over the phone – in fact sometimes you have to, e.g. if you want different cabins on your flights.
@NorthernLass, if you have any handy hints on how you get to/through “custom trip” in a compliant way, that would be great.Thanks.
Progress! My TP total has… reduced. To be fair, due to irrops-induced re-booking I was credited spend-based TPs on a flight re-booked by BA instead of the bonus TPs I should have earned, so that’s all right, fair and proper. What I don’t yet have is any indication of whether the TPs due on the spend of the flights only or entire trip will be credited.
If something useful ever happens, I’ll report back.
@AustinS68 – my current BAH’s don’t end until the autumn so I won’t know how they’ll work in terms of earning TPs until then, but IME using custom trip right from the start always gets you a single price with no way to see what the individual components cost. I always start the booking by clicking on “flight plus hotel” or “flight plus car” and then selecting the custom trip option which shows up at that stage.
*I got 150 TPs for MAN-LHR-MAN in May, but the next elements are car hire in August and October, then MAN-LHR-VLC in November – no idea what I will come out with in total! I currently book BAH’s for convenience rather than TPs but will keep track of what posts, out of interest, over the coming months.
For those joining late:
– make sure your BAH should only one price and not the price for flights / car / hotel separately
– you see that BEFORE paying there is no need to take risks
However! I was able to basically break a BAH by changing a date for the car/hotel. What was a perfectly fine BAH suddenly became a flight + car booking with two separate quotes.
So you need to be careful if playing around with multiple itineraries. I found that starting with a flight and adding a car or hotel FOR THE WHOLE period is fine. But if you change the dates it is not a BAH anymore.
The same itinerary from the custom trip maker worked fine and showed a single price. It is all very flimsy.
If you are given the option to pay a deposit that’s a BAH for sure (but if you don’t pay the deposit it can still be a BAH … this option is just not always available).
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Popular articles this week:
