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Anyone know if you can upgrade a 241 reward flight booked in J, if at a later date some F seats become available?
I ask as I am going to at the end of June try and book my LHR-JNB flights for June 2026 when they become available at 360.
However I have noticed over the last week that BA have released loads of outbound F for June 2025, so I suspect they may do the same next year, and if they do I would love to “upgrade”.
Would this require call to BA and they could simply do this with a £35 each charge. Avios and taxes seems the same. Or would they have to cancel the previous booking which would risk my inbound being snapped up by someone else?
I have googled this but all I get is Avios upgrades not this specific requirement.
Anyone tried to do this or know if this is feasible?Yes it would require a call but the calculations of any extra avios and / or fees can get messy as Club offers RFS pricing but F doesn’t.
I’m sure there was a thread about this not that long ago and an artcle as well so have a look for those.
Would this require call to BA and they could simply do this with a £35 each charge. Avios and taxes seems the same. Or would they have to cancel the previous booking which would risk my inbound being snapped up by someone else?
It definitely requires a call and you’ll need to pay the change fee per person, but it can be difficult to anticipate Avios and cash costs in upgrading. In my limited experience, what we were charged when we upgraded our outbound last year showed limited correspondence with the prices on the website when I searched similar itineraries. Fortunately, in our case, it worked out to our advantage (we were actually refunded 50,000 Avios for upgrading), but have heard of other instances where the calculations were not as favourable.
While they figured out the costs and until we paid, both the original Club World seats and the First Class seats showed in Manage My Booking, so I don’t think you have to worry about losing your seats when upgrading.
Don’t forget it’s actually T-355 for BA releasing seats, they won’t show at T-360.
Upgrading to F might be more straightforward if you have the outbound and inbound on separate bookings, though of course there are other pros and cons related to this.
Long time listener, first time caller….
I did this on Wednesday, albeit for a solo booking using the companion voucher to halve the avios needed, upgrading from J to F on the LHR to JNB leg of a round trip after an alert from the Avios app. Called BA and the agent was able to book the F seat and take payment details for the additional F taxes, which where then passed to a different dept after the call was over to process the payment. My J inbound wasn’t impacted and the F seat outbound was showing in my booking even before payment was taking. 2500 avios refunded as part of the process. Hope that helps!
I did the same on this route last year, I was refunded a small amount of avios and paid extra cash, for a couple hundred quid net increase in cost (plus the £35 change fee). They booked the F seats before cancelling the J seats. Call the YouFirst line to do it.
Thank everyone for all the advice, Looks like I can do it if the scenario arises.
Many thanks.
My wife booked J for LHR/JFK last week – whilst F would have refunded around 10,000 Avios it added £400 in additional cash (return) as not an RFS fare. Travelling with my son so decided not worth it as he would get little for the extra cost involved. I’m sure if we’d been travelling together we would definitely have flown F.
I would also advise that you say “I tried to do this online but couldn’t seem to find a way”. Was admittedly 2 years ago but we were able to go from J to F on a 241 to JNB and back. Used that line and the agent said “oh, you’re upgrading so I can waive the change fee”.
Might have been tightened up by now but the application of it has always struck me as arbitrary unless it’s an outright cancellation.
Just call the You First line. In my experience they will do whatever they can to help and seem to have super-powers not available to other support people. You kind of already paid for the best possible experience (on BA) so trying to nickel’n’dime you for seat selection or WiFi would be a bit pointless – hence they don’t. I expect change fees are the same.
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