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Also teaching is a special case – you know when you enter the profession that you’ll have lots of holiday but it will be very expensive to travel anywhere and you may not have as much choice as other employees!
Well, I think companion vouchers are near useless to anyone who needs flights to popular destinations at popular times of the year.
So for example teaching staff wanting to go to Tokyo in the Easter holidays will have a very bad time of it.
The nonsense of having to phone or be as quick as possible with an online booking at midnight / 1am at t-355 is not for everyone.However, they’re great if you are completely flexible with where and when you can go.
So the fact a literal handfull of people might have to do some work for a handful of routes makes all rewards and vouchers useless?
I think not.
Goodness, it was just one example.
Read the rest of my comment!But you don’t even have to be “completely” flexible. There are posts on here all the time about people managing to score desirable redemptions at peak times, like the reader the other day who was taking the family to Tokyo in the summer holidays.
Other recent posts refer to the Caribbean, Florida, Singapore and other very popular destinations. The thread on bagging the return at T-355 is full of such accounts!
*Also Rob always seems to manage to get 4 CW award seats to Dubai at crazy busy times like October half term and Christmas!
@NorthernLass – I am sure that you would agree that I’m totally inflexible, yet the voucher still works just fine. We get to travel where we want when we want and did so even when we were tied to school holidays, no messing about with convoluted routings. We have booked for Christmas in the last ten days or so on Avios with no compromise on dates or destination. No idea what we might do next Easter but no need to plan that yet. If this stops being possible, we will stop earning vouchers. With all the fuss about T-355 booking, it’s remarkable how many of those seats get cancelled in the ensuing days/weeks.
Wow. There’s a lot of criticism of OP in this thread. I think the OP does have a point. Just because the rest of you have found using the vouchers easy doesn’t mean everyone does. The reality is that BA only guarantees a certain number of seats on each flight unless it’s one of their special all Avios flights. And yes BA does release more seats at other times of the year but that does only work if you are aware of them being released. Which is one of the reasons I read HfP.
I also think that it’s not just teachers who are limited to school holidays. Virtually every parent of school going children is limited to school holidays too. And there are plenty of jobs where you can’t just take time off at will. When I was working I used to be limited to 2 weeks mid-month due to month-ends and there were months I couldn’t even contemplate taking a holiday due to budgeting or tax year ends or P11D preparation.
Yes it is now easier to grab flights due to the extra availability on Club World fares but as I found I couldn’t just start in LHR on my flight to Singapore in March. I could only get flights if I started in NCL. And I was being very flexible albeit not booking a year in advance.
Also it’s all very well saying you can get flights to New York or Dubai but that assumes they are destinations you want to keep flying to. Plus not everyone wants to risk going to the Caribbean in hurricane season.
I have burned several vouchers on short haul flights rather than lose them but I still find the BAPP card and the vouchers useful but that really has only been since I stopped working.
To OP I do hope some of the comments have been helpful to you. Use the Avios rewards app and potentially sign up for a seat spy subscription but in general the answer is to keep checking the BA website. Seats do appear. I do think you need to have some flexibility on both when and where you fly. Remember too that you can use the vouchers on IB and Aer Lingus but that assumes you want to go to where they fly.
To the OP: if you are not finding any use for your points or vouchers then perhaps it is time to switch to hotel points earning card as availability is almost always better (if you use hotels) or into a cashback card – there are some decent-ish ones out there at the moment. A number of HFP people have claimed to have made the switch. It is an opportunity cost for you to earn a currency you have not been able to spend.
If you find use for your avios and not the voucher, then I would probably move to the free Barclays card (if you can spend more than 20k a year), as you can choose to take 7k of avios instead of the voucher which basically up your earning rate on the card. Also consider swapping the BA card to Nector card – much less fee than BAPP and earning rate is higher than the free Amex BA card, also allows you to reset the counter for future sign up bonus. I think it is the most underrated card on HFP.
@AJA, there’s not been any criticism of the OP; pointing out ways in which the companion voucher can be used is not the same thing at all. We were limited to school holidays for many years and both my OH and I were in one of the most difficult professions to get annual leave (especially at the same time), and we never had any problem finding somewhere to go with the voucher.
What needs to be remembered here is that the 241 isn’t a free ticket to go anywhere you want, and nor is it advertised as such; it’s a discount of 50% on the avios needed for 2 people to book available award seats, and between BA, IB and EI, no other programme offers this kind of redemption availability.
I don’t believe there has been any criticism in any posts,
In fact the OP should have some useful knowledge now from these posts, for future use of said 2-4-1 voucher, this site is for advise and helping posters with any travel requests they may have, and in this case I believe that has been achieved.@NL and @Gordon people have variously told OP that he’s trolling us, that actually raising the issue of not being able to use the voucher is odd, that he’s not being flexible enough, not booking far enough ahead, being too picky in choice of destination and wanting to use them for exact dates, suggested that he shouldn’t bother with holding the card if he finds using the vouchers annoying, shouldn’t bother paying for the card, and that it is user’s fault that he can’t use the voucher.
If that’s not criticism I don’t know what it is.
Of course a lot of those points are also indeed criticisms of the voucher but there seems to be a lot of blaming the user rather than acknowledging there are indeed issues with the voucher.
@AJA yes the trolling was an unwelcome comment to use!
but if I was on the receiving end of these comments, I would have perceived the majority to be constructive criticism, Anyway, I hope the OP has indeed gained something from this thread, whichever way he perceived the majority of comments to be.“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
OP will need to change their behaviour, though, to get value from the voucher. It’s not criticism or blaming just a fact and hopefully helpful!
I’ve not mentioned trolling, and resent the way the post is construed to suggest this, frankly. However, there have been some distinctly troll-ish posts on this site and it’s not unexpected for people to question them.
I think it’s fair game to point out that it’s the OPs lack of planning and effort that’s mostly the problem, not the voucher. As many busy people with travel restrictions have pointed out, they can make it work, you just need to put some effort in.
@NL I didn’t say you were responsible for the trolling so not sure why you resent me pointing it out?. I was responding to your direct reply to me disagreeing with me that there is any criticism of the OP. I gave a list of examples of that criticism.
I do agree that you need some flexibility and that OP will have to modify their approach in order to get use of the vouchers. But that is a criticism of the voucher. I also agree with OP that it is extremely frustrating and annoying when you do search and find no availability. The voucher is supposed to be a reward for spending £10k and soon to be £15k per annum on the card. It is somewhat counterproductive if people find it difficult to use. In fact the extra availability that opens up now is an attempt to make the voucher easier to use. BA/Amex didn’t do that to be magnanimous. That must have been as a result of feedback that too many people were finding it difficult to use.
Or partially to make up for the fact that Amex helped bail BA out during the pandemic by buying lots of Avios in advance, but then BA signed a deal with Barclaycard for another avios credit card!
And probably because the increase in annual fee and required spend was just around the corner!
The voucher doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. As with most things, it’s a case of caveat emptor.
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