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Not using any vouchers, looking to fly MAD – JFK one way in business with a lap infant (under 2). I’ve Avios in BAEC and Iberia+.
The consensus seemed to be that booking via iberia, they can’t handle a reward booking with infant on their website so you had to call to add the infant later. When doing so they will charge you 10% of the flexible cash fare. However since BA and iberia standardised their taxes and fees for iberia flights booked via BAEC, you could book this ticket with BAEC and then the infant would just cost 10% of the Avios and 10% of the cash element. The BA site can handle the infant and you shouldn’t pay any inflated cash element anymore when flying iberia booked at BA, as used to be the case.
Looking at 16 November. A one way adult business ticket on iberia costs over 6000€, so 10% of this would be very steep.
Firstly, whilst the iberia website still prevents adding an infant if paying by Avios (and gives you a number to call as per the HfP article last year) it does appear that now YOU CAN ADD AN INFANT TO BOOK A REWARD FLIGHT USING THE IBERIA APP. So that’s progress.
But pricing is all over the place.
Via iberia+ (in app)
Adult 34k Avios + 139.14€
Adult + infant 37.4k Avios + 278.28€
So correctly 10% more Avios but they’ve just doubled the tax and fees element (not 10%)Via BAEC
Adult 34k Avios + £119.60
Adult + infant 37.4K Avios + £187.60
Again the Avios is correct at 10% more but cash element is £68, a seemingly random 57ish% of adult cash element.Any idea what’s going on here?
According to my experience, Iberia doesn’t charge that much for adding an infant to a reward booking over the phone. I added my son a couple of years ago to a reward booking to the Maldives and we paid something like 200 euros (although the cost of the cheapest business class was about 5k euros at the time). Considering that it was 125k avios per adult plus more than 200 euros of taxes, it was merely the same as 10% avios and 10% taxes, if you value avios at 1p. Similar last Christmas flying in Economy to Dakar, the prices were over 1k euros and we only paid 60 euros for adding the infant. I really don’t know how they calculate these rates.
I would also recommend changing the country to UK in Iberia website/app, so it is priced in gbp. I have realised that most of the times, the prices are significantly better in gbp vs eur, when booking with avios (especially when using the lower options, more cash less avios). Not sure why though.IIRC any discount for a child applies only to the airline element of the fare and not on the proper taxes and airport fees.
You need to check the detailed fare breakdown to see which part is discounted and which isn’t
Interesting points, thanks. I just had a look at qatar (different trip) and they don’t let you book reward seats in business cabins for infants (according to the app) but you can book say MAD-DOH via BAEC. Adding an infant for this flight just adds 10% Avios (4300) but zero extra cash, total remains the same (just £77.20) whether one adult or adult and infant. It’s hard to know what is policy and what is a bug!
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