Changing one leg of journey on BA Holiday booking

[astra19]

Hi all,
I’ve had a search for similar issues but don’t see anything that’s quite applicable to my situation.
I’ve got a BA Holiday booking in a month: GLA-LHR-NYC in F with hotel and return the same way. Something’s come up in work and I might have to be in London a few days before the trip, so it wouldn’t make sense to fly up and back down again (since I should be getting Gold after this trip anyway!).

Questions:
I don’t have the detail yet so it’s a slight hypothetical, but when the time comes will I have to call BA Holidays or does You First deal with these changes also?

Is it possible/likely that I can easily change the flights to LHR-NYC then NYC-LHR-GLA on return without messing up the double tier points or having to cancel and rebook the whole thing? If there was the possibility of moving only the GLA-LHR flight to a different date on the same booking that would be great but I can’t imagine there’s any way that could work if I’m staying for a few days.

Thanks all.

[davefl]

Anything you do with them will reprice the whole itinerary at the current price.

When they cancelled both my in and outbund flights on my Cyprus trip and rebooked me on wholly unsuitable ones with a tight connection on the outbound (made it with less than 5 mins to spare) and a 7 hour layover at LHR on the way back, and also losing hhalf a day of holiday at either end… the only response I got to moving the day was reprice or refund.

And then over 4 months and much chasing to get the double tier points.

I’ll never book another BA Holiday again.

[The real Swiss Tony]

Blimey @davefl that couldn’t be further removed from my experiences with BA Holidays over the last few months. Sorry to hear.

Two separate bookings, both seeing minor changes to flight times (but significant enough to matter) and both being handled with a huge amount of understanding and effort from BAH’s side.

Then when a hotel – the Conrad in New York – failed to actually give us the suite we had paid for, BAH jumped in overnight on a bank holiday weekend no less and opened an oversized can of whoop-ass on them, resulting in another favourable outcome for me. (My thinking is the hotel felt as an OTA booking we were a soft touch so they would get away with it – wrong…)

They are a world apart from the OTA’s I ended up involved with pre-pandemic and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others. And that’s before the very obvious cashflow benefits of not paying everything up front.

[Jacob]

davefl wrote:

When they cancelled both my in and outbund flights on my Cyprus trip and rebooked me on wholly unsuitable ones with a tight connection on the outbound (made it with less than 5 mins to spare) and a 7 hour layover at LHR on the way back, and also losing hhalf a day of holiday at either end… the only response I got to moving the day was reprice or refund.

You should have pushed back. If it’s a involuntary change or cancellation you have full right for a better re-route or even date change. I had a couple of BAH bookings in the last year and had no issues at all. In one instance they even changed the destination (from MIA to NAS) with no problems. Other times I used it to my advantage and got rebooked on direct flights (instead of layovers).

@astra19 – as already said, you will get it repriced and likely will be expensive – unfortunately it’s not as easy as just asking them to drop one sector. Try doing a dummy booking to see the current pricing.

[duggie1982]

davefl wrote:

Anything you do with them will reprice the whole itinerary at the current price.

When they cancelled both my in and outbund flights on my Cyprus trip and rebooked me on wholly unsuitable ones with a tight connection on the outbound (made it with less than 5 mins to spare) and a 7 hour layover at LHR on the way back, and also losing hhalf a day of holiday at either end… the only response I got to moving the day was reprice or refund.

And then over 4 months and much chasing to get the double tier points.

I’ll never book another BA Holiday again.

Do you know why you had to chase up the double tier points? I have a 6 week gap to allow them to credit me with mine on a holiday coming up in July but seeing a few comments on here about missing double tier points makes me feel un hopeful

[yonasl]

duggie1982 wrote:

davefl wrote:

Anything you do with them will reprice the whole itinerary at the current price.

When they cancelled both my in and outbund flights on my Cyprus trip and rebooked me on wholly unsuitable ones with a tight connection on the outbound (made it with less than 5 mins to spare) and a 7 hour layover at LHR on the way back, and also losing hhalf a day of holiday at either end… the only response I got to moving the day was reprice or refund.

And then over 4 months and much chasing to get the double tier points.

I’ll never book another BA Holiday again.

Do you know why you had to chase up the double tier points? I have a 6 week gap to allow them to credit me with mine on a holiday coming up in July but seeing a few comments on here about missing double tier points makes me feel un hopeful

I have never heard of these posting without some chasing. Thankfully you simply have to email Customer.Relations@holidays.BritishAirways.com

[davefl]

@duggie1982 It’s a manual process to credit the extra points and they dont have the staff, mostly because they’re dealing with 100s of cancellations and hundreds of complaints/compensation claims per day.

I don’t think you’ll find anyone on here who got their double points in the 30 days that BA contactually promised. Every email I sent to them was ignored, the formal complaint I made back in early March has also been ignored.

@Jacob I couldnt. Was fixed to that week due to a number of factors and rerouting would have meant i would lose the opportunity to get silver with double tier points – I wanted that to leverage seat/baggage on my upcoming flights on AA but because BA took 4 months to make me silver I actually lost 3 months of silver status and it cost me $100 in extra cost to AA.

[astra19]

Thanks all for the responses.
A dummy booking isn’t working unfortunately. I think the fact it’s in F is making it stop working when looking for connections. In any case, I can imagine the price difference might be huge because we got a decent deal at the time.

I’m guessing BA Holidays can’t retrospectively add a stopover since my flight is a connecting one?

Also, to echo the experiences other than the call centre being short-staffed I’ve always been happy with BA Holidays. Similarly to Tony I once had a bit of a hotel cockup and BA pushed a lot to get us back on track.

EDIT: Simply looking at the flights I booked (the return Glasgow leg is actually sold out in Club), the price difference is into five figures so maybe I will be taking an extra couple of flights instead.

• This reply was modified 54 years, 4 months ago by .

[ChrisC]

@astra19

To reiterate because this would be voluntary change to start the trip in LHR rather than GLA they would reprice the whole holiday.

If there has been a cancellation or a significant change in schedule time since you booked (think with BA it’s 4 hours)there is more flexibility to adjust the trip and that might allow you to travel to a London a few days earlier than the original schedule with not much additional cost (would definitely be short haul APD and some extra airport fees and maybe some carrier surcharge)

So it’s either pray to the cancellation gods or be prepared to do the shuffle up and down the country.

And a reminder to some posters that holidays come under a different set of regulations and whilst EU/UK261 applies to last minute cancellations and delays the full panoply of changing dates for free to months in the future don’t automatically apply. BA holidays can be quite flexible but there are limits as to what they are able to do because of the regulations rather than them being awkward.

• This reply was modified 54 years, 4 months ago by .

[astra19]

@ChrisC
Thanks for the explanation, it does makes sense. That kind of change has happened to a lot of trips but not this one! I’ll just stick with the one that’s booked now and do a separate trip and pick up some more points.