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Double posting here as wasn’t sure whether the BA / Avios page was right (as this is through AerClub)….
I’ve just suffered several painful trips through the terrible Avios.com website, trying to book 2 adults, 1 child and 1 infant on LHR-ORK return outbound 5th March, back 9th March.
The website shows available, 8 seats on the Saturday. I go through all the pages, entering payment only to get a “Sorry, there’s been a problem with your booking” page at the end.
Called the number and was told there’s no availability on either of these days and the website is giving false availability. Seems crazy.
Anyone else had this problem and can advise on opening up these seats through the call centre for me?
Also, is the website is as prone to crashingfor everyone else as it is for me? Even without today’s issue it’s close to enough to make me never travel with BA, EI again!
Any pointers gratefully received!!!
There’s availability showing on ba.com, could you book from there?
I don’t have any advice sorry but just to say this has also happened to me so please update if you manage to resolve.
Using avios on AerLingus flights seems to have got increasingly difficult over the last few months. I don’t know if they have withdrawn lots of flights or it’s a glitch but it’s incredibly frustrating. Hardly worth saying they are part of Avios.
I booked MAN-DUB via BA with no issues recently – if you have enough avios in a BA account it would seem to be the simplest way forward! It was 4k avios plus £56 each, not a huge saving on the cash price but gives checked baggage and more flexibility than a straight cash booking.
Are the avios.com surcharges significantly lower?Thanks Northern Lass, trying BA was a good idea. I whizzed over there last night and sure enough there was availability. So I ploughed through the booking, had the option to fully pay for the flight exc fees with Avios, the same total points as I tried with Avios.com, albeit with fees etc of £257.46.
Even though this is quite a bit on top of the £119.46 quoted for the Avios.com reward flights, value per Avios was better than I was being quoted on the EI website (where I couldn’t fully pay for the flight exc fees with Avios).
But lo and behold, after presenting my payment I got a page saying the flight had sold out whilst completing the transfer. Which given the times and dates of the flights I absolutely doubt, and this morning the same seats still showed on BA.
As they also did on Avios.com, where again I got a different error page at the last stage of booking (code AV737983 anyone?). And to add insult to injury the phone number presented to contact on this page today is wrong (starts 0844 instead of 0344).
This was after I was told by the Multichannel Team Manager, who I have on email now, that the false availability happens when the Avios.com “website takes a few moments to catch up with the live availability provided by Aer Lingus”. Obviously it’s not a few moments, and it’s not just Avios.com but BA also, so I suspect again – like before Christmas – something is very broken in Aer Lingus IT and its reporting of Avios bookable seats.
Personally I think the seats are there and haven’t sold out, so will keep on trying to get through and escalate to someone who might care what an utterly shameful customer experience this is at the moment. You literally cannot believe what you are being told by multiple IAG websites about seat availability at the moment, and have to waste time and money going though the booking process to discover if they actually are bookable or not.
Will keep all posted!!!
How frustrating!
I haven’t used avios.com for a few years, but BA IT can definitely be flaky. I would even go so far as to try booking it on a phone to see if it makes a difference – i and others here can attest that you can do things on a phone that you can’t on a computer when it comes to BA!
Thanks NorthernLass, I thought a phone call to BA might be a good shout. Any idea on the best number to call? No worries if not, can have root around later to find out, but thought you might have experience which of the several I think they have could prove the most helpful. Thanks again 🙂
No, I mean use the internet on your phone! That is how flaky the IT is, lol.
But if you want to call the numbers are on the website with options for making new bookings, etc. I’m fortunate to be able to use the Silver line these days which has been excellent the 2 times I’ve resorted to calling!
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