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I recently booked a return ticket in F from LHR to ORD using 160,000 AVIOS and the customary exhorbitant cash fees. Three days later, BA announced the potential to use a new style Companion Voucher for a solo traveller at half the normal amount of AVIOS – in this case 80,000. Never one to throw away what is potentially £800 worth of AVIOS, I called the dedicated F ‘phone line to cancel my existing booking and then immediatel re-book using the Companion Voucher as soon as the award seats showed up again. However, the agent (who incidentally, seemed rather fed up and uninterested) warned me that the F award seats might not appear immediately – or at all, depending on the availability of cash seats etc on the particular flight, so I abandoned the idea. I have done this once before (for an entirely different reason) and it worked fine i.e. withion a minute of the agent cancelling the existing flight, the award seats appeared as available on his screen and he grabbed them for the new booking.
The question therefore is, was the disinterested agent right or simply being a miserable sausage who couldn.t be bothered with the faff? Has anybody experience of this situation themselves?
There is no way of knowing. Sometimes seats come back straight away, sometimes a few days later and sometimes never. It’s perhaps worth looking at the cash availability to gauge the likelihood. F availability is, in my experience, particularly unpredictable. I recently booked seats in F to MEX, there were 3 available which was the number I wanted, but I needed to book in two bookings. Bagged two with a voucher but the third seat then went. I guessed it was very unlikely that someone actually took it, so set an alert and kept checking and it duly reappeared about three days later.
I think the only route I’d do this on would be the JFK route where the chances are that even if a cancelled F reward dosen’t immedialy come back for your preferred flight the chances are there are F seats on one of the several other flights that day.
ORD only has two BA flights a day so less choice of flights and less chance there will be availability.
Instead of complaing about the agent I think they did the right thing in advising you what could happen and so gave you the choice as what to do and for you to take the risk. It would have been so easy for them just to cancel your original booking leaving you with nothing.
What I would advise you do is monitor if any F rewards on both the ORD fligths appear and if so that is when I would call You First to do the cancel and rebook. But get them to hold it first.
Definitely call You First, they are much more helpful. I did this last year to add a return but frustratingly the agent refused to recalculate the taxes so I ended up cancelling it while on the phone and the seats came back straight away and I just booked the whole thing from scratch.
There aren’t that many F seats to JFK atm, BOS and PHL have much better availability, for example. I’ve seen the odd couple to MIA as well recently, which would be a great redemption.Thanks for all your advice. I’ve set an alert on Seat Spy and will keep the availability of additional F seats under review.
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