[Thunderbirds]

Setting aside your valuation of avios the strategy of using cash on low availability routes (particularly at sale prices) and avios on high availability routes is a very effective one for frequent flyers, I use it myself. However the once a year 2-4-1’ers who frequent this site don’t have the flexibily to play this game! The BAEC does need to be worked hard to get the most out of it and ironically I find that means planning well advance or planning last minute. Nobody said it was easy!

[SimonS1]

Brusselsregular – ideally not pretend that they had found it.

Plus they haven’t yet fixed it, have they 😉 Just going to do it ASAP.

VK is impressed by the amount of capacity available in the next few days. Quelle surprise. The airline is under booked and have opened it right up.

Have a look say 3 or 6 months out and see what the picture is.

[SergeantMajor]

You’ll find that the availability pattern recurs; there’s almost always plenty with a week or so’s notice; ideal for those who wish to upgrade using avios.

It’s suits me fine, and it’s not just late availability, as others on this very thread have evidenced:

http://www.businesstraveller.com/discussion/topic/BAEC-Reward-tickets-in-Club-and-First?page=1#97373

….where pdwtrip sets out how they were succesful booking far in advance on this very popular route.

I’ve also made full redemptions in the past, in advance, though that was because of an exceptionally valuable avios deal, as I maintain this is one of the least valuable redemption routes for my personal circumstances.

[Papillion53]

Swindoneric@11:49

We have come across this as well with connecting flights up to Scotland, so now what I do is look for redemptions from/to London and then separately look for redemptions from/to ABZ.. Sometimes they match up and the redemption is available all the way through. It can also vary by the cabin you’ve booked for international sectors too. For example we were flying back from JFK, booked in CW with a good few hours to hang around LHR, as no earlier flights to ABZ were available on redemption flights. We then wanted to extend our stay in JFK and when I phoned BAEC to change the flights, they did that and we were offered an upgrade to F which we accepted and that in turn offered us a much better connection to ABZ.

But it wouldn’t be a deal breaker to do what you’ve done and pay for a domestic flight.

I’ve also just booked a trip to OZ next year, using a 241 ABZ-HKG, BA CW; CX HKG to ADL in their new business cabin using avios and paying a very small sum for taxes and fees; I didn’t have enough avios left to book the SYD-HKG sector in business, so I was about to issue orders to the DH to get travelling (;-) ) when I remembered we had some VS miles and couldn’t believe it when there was availability in UC SYD-HKG! I had to buy more VS miles, but as you can buy up to 100,000 each year, I had lots of lee way! I think I did say I would never fly with them again, but this worked out very well! 😉 🙂

I would love it if you could buy more BA avios annually than you currently can.

I’ve never travelled on CX or on VS in UC, or on a BA A380, so this trip will be quite interesting!

I also disagree with SM – for most people to buy a F return to SYD would simply not be an option as markbilcliff quite rightly pointed out. So for us, our last trip on BA in F to SYD using a 241 and avios and paying the taxes and fees was a fantastic deal! And next year’s trip has worked out well too! I don’t get hung up over the fact that I couldn’t use the 241 this time for the whole trip, but the overall cost is still a fraction of what it would cost in our hard earned cash to pay for the same trip!

It made me wonder this afternoon just how much we’ve saved using avios and 241 vouchers to book flights in the past few years, and a quick tally in my head, I guesstimate the total can’t be far short of £40K!

[NickGrossman]

I managed to book two Amex reward tickets in C for LHR-SYD in December 2013. At the time that I was trying their was also availability for reward tickets in F. Clearly I hit a rare situation at the right time!

[KeaneJohn]

If I was looking for a spur of the moment booking somewhere, I would be thinking, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Budapest etc not Sydney. The risk of purchasing non flight elements of a booking that could be non refundable/non changeable on the assumption that BA would release redemption seats is foolish and crazy.

[SergeantMajor]

The above is very obviously spam….

[Author]

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