Inconsistent BA/QA Avios transfer/combine policy

[Lambtiger]

Hi all

I’m a BAEC member who earns a lot of Avios and I tend to spend most of them with QA as they fly more where I want to go, and the Q-Suite is awesome.

The general rule, confirmed by my experience and the QA Helpdesk is that you need to use the “Combine My Avios” feature on the QA website to move Avios from BA to QA to use them to book a QA reward flight. This is despite the QA website showing your full total Avios balance incl ones sat with BA. Annoyingly the QA website in the past let me “book” reward flights using Avios sat with BA but the booking often never confirms and is auto-cancelled, with the QA team confirming the rule. The exception is if you book a reward flight on the BA website that includes QA: in this case it works fine with Avios on BA, BUT you get far less QA availability on BA, you get more options with QA on the QA website: same with Iberia.

But there are inconsistencies..

Sometimes I’ve used the BA “Combine My Avios” on their website to send Avios to QA and it’s worked and I’ve used those Avios successfully, but other times it’s failed.

And I’ve also sometimes, confirmed by other people on this site, booked a QA reward flight on the QA website when all my Avios is with BA and it’s worked fine and been confirmed.

So annoying, especially since “Combine My Avios” can often be down for days for no obvious reason and I have to bombard both QA and BA Helpdesks with emails asking them to fix it. Flights I want get taken.

Anyway, all the above has been that way for a few years so you learn to live with the rules, such as they are.

The new quirk happened last week. I’m flying to NZ next month and found Business availability from the UK, albeit the double-Avios Flex option: still worth it for 27 hours in a Q-suite. Knowing the rules I transferred sufficient Avios from BA to QA, made the booking, it was confirmed, hurrah. But, half the Avios were deducted from my QA balance and half from the BA balance. New one on me, and makes no sense.

Don’t know if it was a fluke, or new policy, but it’s so confusing. FYI…

[ChrisBCN]

Why don’t you just keep more in your QA account? Send some over every month etc before you need them.

[Sapporosushi]

Lambtiger
I think you, like I did originally, have missed a key point when making an avios booking from a combined QR/BA Avios account
Just before you press to continue to purchasing using avios, there is a question asking you to select which account to use the avios from:
QRPC
BAEC
or
Combined Account
It is auto set to Combined Account hence why it used 50/50 for your purchase
You need to select one of the others if you want to use avios from only a single account

[alfalpha]

Lambtiger wrote:

The new quirk happened last week. I’m flying to NZ next month and found Business availability from the UK, albeit the double-Avios Flex option: still worth it for 27 hours in a Q-suite. Knowing the rules I transferred sufficient Avios from BA to QA, made the booking, it was confirmed, hurrah. But, half the Avios were deducted from my QA balance and half from the BA balance. New one on me, and makes no sense.

Don’t know if it was a fluke, or new policy, but it’s so confusing. FYI…

I have experienced similar this week. On 3 occassions when making new bookings online they failed at the payment stage with no reason given; I had sufficient Avios in BA but none in Qatar priviledge. A month ago I moved sufficient points to Qatar and the transaction went smoothly, this week I moved 180,000 avios to Qatar to make a booking with that points requirement, the booking went smoothly and used 180,000 avios but took 36,275 of the points directly from BA which leaves me with 36,275 Qatar Priviledge points! No idea where that number has come from!

Sapporosushi wrote:

Lambtiger
I think you, like I did originally, have missed a key point when making an avios booking from a combined QR/BA Avios account
Just before you press to continue to purchasing using avios, there is a question asking you to select which account to use the avios from:
QRPC
BAEC
or
Combined Account
It is auto set to Combined Account hence why it used 50/50 for your purchase
You need to select one of the others if you want to use avios from only a single account

There was no such question for me on either successful booking

[John]

I’ve posted about this before.

I was told that when you make a booking on the QR website, after entering your bank card details and clicking confirm, if you’ve chosen to pull avios from BA then it all needs to be done within 3 seconds or else the card payment will time out, but sometimes it takes longer than 3 seconds to get the avios from BA and in that case the payment (and thus the booking) will fail.

Not sure how true this is but that’s why it’s best to move avios to QR manually before booking. I haven’t had any issues with moving from BA to QR.

[domf]

I recently booked business class on Qatar from Uk to Australia return on the Qatar website. It simply transferred my avios as part of the booking process without issue. I had 0 Avios in my Qatar account.

[Sapporosushi]

To Lambtiger
That question about which linked account to take avios from, detailed above, is part of the process.
It does not need answering to progress as it is already pre-answered.
You do however have the option, via a drop down menu, of changing which account to take your avios from.

[Hbommie]

domf wrote:

I recently booked business class on Qatar from Uk to Australia return on the Qatar website. It simply transferred my avios as part of the booking process without issue. I had 0 Avios in my Qatar account.

I wish this was my experience, I currently have an Australia booking on hold but the Avios can’t be accessed from my BA account…and transfer between my linked accounts isn’t working.