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I’ve been checking availability of open jaw to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong for a trip this summer in Business and with a 2 4 1 voucher. Totally flexible on when and where. It’s fairly straight forward to find Business seats out to the region but difficult to find Business seats back. They do appear (and very quickly disappear), but so far they haven’t aligned with the timings of the flight out.
Does anyone know if they appear in real time as someone else cancels their booking or is the system updated with the cancellations over night?
Basically is there any point checking the BA website multiple times a day rather than just once a day early doors?
Cheers
When someone cancellation a reward seat there is no guarantee that it will be released back and even if it does it could be weeks later.
Same when BA releases new ones over and above the initial allocation there isn’t a strict timetable.
When someone cancellation a reward seat there is no guarantee that it will be released back and even if it does it could be weeks later.
Same when BA releases new ones over and above the initial allocation there isn’t a strict timetable.
Thank you. I’ll avoid checking on the hour every hour then 🙂
Basically is there any point checking the BA website multiple times a day rather than just once a day early doors?
CheersYes, it’s well worth doing.
For various reasons I’ve had to cancel a fair few Avios flights over the past 5 years. In most (but by no means all) cases the flights pop back up straight away. So if you check at 5 PM, and I cancelled at 5:01 PM, you’d have missed out. But if you’d checked again at 6 PM you might just have been lucky.
More recently, I’ve done it from the other side. I’m (hopefully) getting a puppy in the next few months, and wanted to use my Avios up on a trip to Japan before he arrives… which meant I couldn’t do what I normally do, book at midnight 355 days out. Of course, nothing available for the next few months, so I signed up for a free trial with SeatSpy. A couple of days later and I had an alert one afternoon, and sure enough there were two Club seats – so I booked them.
That made things harder, as I now had a small window of dates for the return. Still nothing, the trial expired, and I checked every few hours through the day each day just in case. Then one lunchtime, bam, two seats came up – and I snagged them.
I then used a free trial of ExpertFlyer to check the loads on the flights. Only F2 on the way out, but a promising F7 A6 on the way back. I decided to check for First seats on the way back.
And then, yesterday morning I woke up early with a sore foot. Went downstairs at 3AM, logged in, and lo – 3 First seats had appeared for the way back! I did the risky thing of cancelling the Club booking, waited 1 minute for the Avios to return, then booked 2 First seats. That made my day, frankly.
The two Club seats I cancelled ended back up for redemption, and they’d both gone (along with that extra First seat) by this morning.
Well done you!!! I know from experience when I made a rookie mistake and cancelled my Avios booking entirely instead of just the return leg I needed to change. The outbound did not reappear as BA Flyer IHG Stayer stated . However the extra availability must appear at some time. And you do see random 1 or 2 seats just appear when checking daily.
Well done you!!! I know from experience when I made a rookie mistake and cancelled my Avios booking entirely instead of just the return leg I needed to change. The outbound did not reappear as BA Flyer IHG Stayer stated . However the extra availability must appear at some time. And you do see random 1 or 2 seats just appear when checking daily.
Thank you! 😁
There are two things at work there:
* When an Avios booking is cancelled it’ll either pop up instantly (majority of cases) or not at all.
* Around midnight a sweep is run of flights, and the revenue management system might decide that BA won’t be able to sell all the seats, so opens some up for Avios bookings. This is how those three First seats would have appeared – and it’s entirely possible that seats from previous cancelled Avios bookings would appear during one of those sweeps if they hadn’t popped up the instant they were cancelled.In short – if you really want a flight AND there are a fair number of revenue seats still left for sale, don’t give up hope! Keep checking and even on popular routes you may well score some seats.
SeatSpy makes it easier (and you get a 2-week free trial, use it wisely) but it’s not essential.
Thank you for that thorough response.
Out of interest, were the dates that you managed to get availability during ‘peak’ times aka UK school holidays?
Thank you for that thorough response.
Out of interest, were the dates that you managed to get availability during ‘peak’ times aka UK school holidays?
Over the years, it’s been a mix – mostly during school holidays for several years, as I worked in a school, and then this time round during term-time. (The previous trip I cancelled, also to Tokyo, was over a half-term, and the flights also appeared about 6 weeks out. The seats reappeared when I cancelled a week out from the flight, but they were gone within a couple of hours.)
There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason as to when seats pop up aside from the initial release, I can only assume those times when seats didn’t reappear in the pool after cancellation were times when BA’s revenue management though they would sell as a cash fare.
The biggest change over the years is of course First availability – but never say never, even on a “halo” route like Tokyo. In the old days when there were 14F seats, you could pretty much guarantee there would be 2 seats released on Tuesday and Thursday flights, and that’s how I got them in the past – of course, 355 days out. That no longer happens, but coincidentally (or not) the flight with those 3 First seats was on a Tuesday. I bet the old algorithm’s still there under the surface, just with fewer seats to play with!
I have read multiple times that if it’s cancelled +45 days out and BA has only released the minimum Avios seats then they’ll immediately reappear. Otherwise it depends on the usual algorithm they run to decide to release more or not.
On a route like KL I’d be quite confident BA only releases the minimum until much nearer the time so any cancellation more than 45 days out would reappear. But it’s impossible to know. A seatspy premium subscription may be worthwhile for you as it promises realtime updates
A seatspy premium subscription may be worthwhile for you as it promises realtime updates
Be careful about this. What Seatspy mean by real-time updates is that they’ll update you as soon as they find out about the new seats. That’s not the same as updating you as soon as those seats are actually released.
I’m a Seatspy Premium subscriber and have noticed delays of several hours between when I cancelled a seat which (when I checked on BA) went straight back into availability and when my Seatspy alert for this date (which I‘d forgotten to cancel) notified me of this availability which had been added several hours earlier.
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