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BA are presumably doing some major IT work to implement the new TP rules.
What could possibly go wrong …
@Wanderlost. Glad you managed to find the Ts&Cs. I can see the website and phone lines going into meltdown come April when BAEC member’s find they haven’t got the status they were expecting. I hate to think what will happen next year!
Wish me luck. I’ve got a booking (made since 30 December) that starts in March and ends in April! Assume outbound flight will qualify under current TPs and inbound flight under new terms. It isn’t clear in my booking! Will cross that bridge when I get to it.
It’s going to be carnage.
Perhaps our friends from McKinsey were smart enough to upsell them an enhanced customer call centre facility to handle everything.
@LD27. I’d make the same assumption as you, and wish you good luck. Not so much safe travels and all the usual blah blah, but safe tier points.It’s going to be carnage.
Perhaps our friends from McKinsey were smart enough to upsell them an enhanced customer call centre facility to handle everything.
@LD27. I’d make the same assumption as you, and wish you good luck. Not so much safe travels and all the usual blah blah, but safe tier points.What tier points?! In MMB under the heading rewards for this booking, the number of Avios earned is stated, but for tier points it states “Plus your eligible tier points”. So on this basis no one knows what tier points they will get until after they have been awarded. Do we trust BA IT to get it right? I don’t! May be I should email McKinsey!
@LD27, yes, mine says exactly the same. Helpful, huh? I suppose there’s the ‘bonus’ TPs (oh, the generosity of those!), but they’re hardly going to be a big boost. Let’s face it, there’s hardly any need for any additional screen real estate to fit any huge numbers in.
Although one of my future flight bookings is now showing (new) tier points (155 of them, wooo! LCY return to AMS), the more substantive LHR-ORD-CLT-LHR flights in F on the TATL and J on the US internal flights plus hotel is still showing as ‘Plus your eligible tier points’.
We can conclude that, so far at least, the vast computing power that BA has at its disposal is able to perform simple mathematics. Which, arguably, is an improvement.
Yes the flight only bookings have managed the ‘old TP’ x 13.33 calculation, BAH bookings presumably to follow in due course.
At least it’s another way of confirming when a holiday is a holiday 😀
Yes the flight only bookings have managed the ‘old TP’ x 13.33 calculation, BAH bookings presumably to follow in due course.
At least it’s another way of confirming when a holiday is a holiday 😀
IF BA is unable to advise on the number of nTPs
THEN it’s a holiday
ELSE it might not be.Just checking in on this: post-Jan booking for travel after 31st March is still showing in MMB as xx,xxx Avios ‘plus your eligible tier points’. So, BA is still silent on the specifics of how many tier points will be earned on ‘holidays’. Flight-only bookings seem to cause it less trouble and the earned points are shown in MMB.
Still no further clarity on the TPs that this booking would earn, but it looks like the T&Cs / FAQs have been updated. They now say:
You must book through the Flight + Hotel or Flight + Car option and add the individual British Airways Club number for each Member prior to travel to earn Tier Points for your British Airways Holidays package.
The bold is as per the BA FAQs page. When I make a dummy booking via the flight+hotel option I get no choice on the flights. When I searched for a random future date I was offered only the most expensive flights and at no point during the (dummy) booking process was there a chance to select cheaper ones.
Conclusion: BA Holidays may well be a bloody expensive way to book something if your goal is to also earn TPs on the non-carrier imposed tax element of the overall price. If you’re lucky, the add-ons (hotel, car hire) may well be enough to offset those forfeited TPs. Note that this was a work trip to LAS where it would be only me on the booking, on a route where I would generally fly via ORD, CLT, PHX, DFW etc. to help significantly reduce the cost.
Sharks, I reckon.
When you do a standard ‘flight & hotel’ it brings up suggested flights, but underneath is a box saying ‘chose alternative flights’. I’ve sort of deduced they offer the quickest flights as standard, and there’s a limited selection to chose from.
Alternatively, especially if you are flying with a connection, after clicking the ‘flight & hotel’ there’s an option for ‘custom trip’ which means you can easily chose from full range of flights. I use this most of the time as I fly first EDI-LHR and often put in an overnight stay.
Unless of course the new nx website has removed all these options……….
For LAS it takes me straight to the hotel choices.
Trying again for PRG and JFK and I get exactly the same: zero flight choice. Straight to select a hotel and then onto the payment page.
Maybe it’s a BA IT snafu or maybe BA Holidays is now code for ‘the most expensive possible option and no option for anything else.’
Have you tried “create custom trip”, as per @freckles? Or try a different browser?
Have you tried “create custom trip”, as per @freckles? Or try a different browser?
Ah, sorry, yes, that works. @freckles, apologies, I missed that tip. OK, so I retract my previous assertion that BA Holidays is merely a cynical device for extracting max cash from point-starved and wear BA Clubbers. Although…
Have you tried “create custom trip”, as per @freckles? Or try a different browser?
Ah, sorry, yes, that works. @freckles, apologies, I missed that tip. OK, so I retract my previous assertion that BA Holidays is merely a cynical device for extracting max cash from point-starved and wear BA Clubbers. Although…
*weary
@Wanderlost, just tried LAS (last vegas) on my phone mobile BA site. Chrome browser.
Yes, the hotel choice is most prominent but underneath each hotel is a little click down saying ‘your flights’. Open that up.and I still see ‘chose alternative flights’Maybe a visit to specsavers 😉
@Wanderlost, just tried LAS (last vegas) on my phone mobile BA site. Chrome browser.
Yes, the hotel choice is most prominent but underneath each hotel is a little click down saying ‘your flights’. Open that up.and I still see ‘chose alternative flights’Maybe a visit to specsavers 😉
You are 100% correct. I was making more of a meal of that than necessary. Not for the first time, I should add. Thanks for the guidance.
So, whilst we can conclude that I need to pay more attention to detail, I stand by my earlier suggestion that BA Holidays leads the optically challenged consumer to the most expensive flights by default: the first ‘alternative flight’ option yielded a £5k saving over BA’s suggested flights.
Notwithstanding my holiday booking ineptitude, I still have no idea whether the ‘holiday’ I booked some time back will qualify for the full TPs or the gross amount minus the taxes.
Glad you now know how to flex a BAH @Wanderlost, I will conceed BA is not necessarily the most intuitive website if you’re not a regular user of it!
Hopefully your full TP will arrive in due course.
Glad you now know how to flex a BAH @Wanderlost, I will conceed BA is not necessarily the most intuitive website if you’re not a regular user of it!
Hopefully your full TP will arrive in due course.
For better or for worse I use the thing on a monotonously regular basis, just seldom for holidays, and in the past they’ve tended to be booked over the phone. It’s fair to say that I’ve not benefitted much from the old double TP offers because our holidays tend to be incompatible with what BAH offers. Let’s see whether the new Club rules entice me to use it for BAH more often. The jury is still very much out.
@Wanderlost – interesting what you say about BAH offering the most expensive flights. My experience recently has been the opposite. I’ve been looking at booking a long weekend to Budapest. Whatever dates I inputted, the flights were always the cheapest. There were 3 outbound flights on Friday and the flight offered was always the one that arrived at 11pm and on the dates I selected was always the cheapest. Always offered the cheapest inbound flights too.
I’ve had some great deals recently. 8 short haul flights plus 5 days’ car hire in August for £600 was the most recent booking. Not interested in TPs at all this year, just the best price.
Just checking in on this: post-Jan booking for travel after 31st March is still showing in MMB as xx,xxx Avios ‘plus your eligible tier points’. So, BA is still silent on the specifics of how many tier points will be earned on ‘holidays’. Flight-only bookings seem to cause it less trouble and the earned points are shown in MMB.
Yes. Same for me. Still no points in MMB for BAH.
Interestingly my post December flights only booking which departs March returns April, only states one number for tier points. Surely it should differentiate between old and new? Fortunately I don’t need the outbound tier points to retain status. Otherwise i think I might have a fight on my hands.
It will be interesting to see how BA IT copes with flight only postings. I think BAH double tier points are added manually. If they have to do that for flights like mine crossing the year end, I can see it could take forever and there could be lots of challenges of numbers posted …
As MMB has only ever shown a single number for TP’s to be earned for all flights on a booking, you can’t expect them to develop and (heaven forbid) test some additional functionality which will become obsolete shortly after the one off changeover occurs. It’s not really any different to multi-flight bookings spanning a collection year end, where it doesn’t attempt to identify what TPs will be earned in which year.
@LD27 and @NorthernLass, interesting contrast with what I’ve been seeing. I’ll not rule out BAH but certainly will validate whether the pricing is competitive. Thanks for balancing what I’ve seen with your experiences.
Well the only ‘positive’ enhancement I can see from all these changes and IT updates, is that you can now see a copy of your e-ticket in MMB. Not sure what will happen if flights are reticketed.
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