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I’ve already booked a business class flight for next year using approx 174k avios and a companion voucher for my family of four. I’m due in a few days to sort out the return leg but at the moment I don’t know what the cost will be (aiming for Premium Economy but will consider Business) should I boost my avios (I have 61,400 and can boost to 120,000 at 109 avios per £1 at a cost of £538) given I’ll be spending more than the cost of this anyway? First time doing this so looking for advice.
You may have a problem here as BA generally requires you to pay the same avios plus cash ratio for an inbound journey as for the outbound. When adding the return leg by phone, or book online and request 50% of the avios back, agents seem to insist on this more often than not (if you plan to do either of these).
Where are you flying to/from and which avios/cash option did you use? Have you done a dummy booking previously to see how many avios and cash you would need?
BA also only guarantees to release 2 award seats in PE – there are often more than this but again it depends a lot on route and travel date.
The same agent I booked with is going to call me back to book the return leg and he obviously knew my fully balance when I made the outbound booking and didn’t flag an issue. Do you think that means it won’t be a problem?
Gatwick to Tampa. I’m not 100% sure but I think 50% avios given it was 174k as I’d imagine it should be a lot more for business. I initially was on the call at 1am on sale and wanted PE but he immediately said they’d gone which I now think meant they only had 2 maybe and I wanted 4?
I think he would have meant that someone else had grabbed the PE seats already it will be a very popular route for the summer holidays.
It sounds as though the agent was just concentrating on getting your outbound seats for the avios you had available and picked the 58k avios plus £662 pp option (factoring in 3 x avios plus 4 x fees).
With 61k avios, you don’t have enough to get 4 of you back in CW. Assuming you’re travelling on a peak date, if you book PE, you could use 20k avios x 3 plus £415 pp (IF you can get 4 seats, which is unlikely). The economy option would be 19k avios x 3 plus £240 pp.
You can do a dummy booking to see the prices available if you boosted your avios.
I have to ask if you costed this up when you were planning the trip? And is the agent definitely going to be available when the inbound seats are released?
If it helps I booked LGW TPA this year and quite a few PE seats appeared closer to the date (I booked I think in Feb for August and they had 8 mid August coming back) so as they only guarantee 2 PE per flight I would probably book those two with the companion voucher and two in economy. You can then change these if more become available. This also gives you time to earn more avios or boost if required?
If OP has 4 pax on the outbound booking, BA may not agree to only having 2 on the inbound, and it’s not possible to have different cabins on the same booking. It is possible in theory to have different numbers of pax on the inbound and outbound, but agents may not realise this, or may interpret the rules differently.
It would be possible to book 4 x economy then look to upgrade at a later date, if OP had sufficient avios at that point. MCO/MIA could be other options, although MCO will be in very high demand.
@McScriven – It’s not “possible in theory to have different numbers of pax on the inbound and outbound” on the same PNR and there’s no question that an agent “may interpret the rules differently” as it’s a global reservation system standard, nothing that BA can change. For the avoidance of doubt, you can have different cabins on the same booking but every passenger must be in the same cabin on each sector.
What you can ask an agent to do is to split the booking so that the voucher holder + one (probably child) is on one booking in whichever class you can book and the other two pax on a separate booking also in whichever class you are able to book.
The agent can add a TCP message into your booking which may assist in you all being seated together if in the same cabin.
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