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British Airways has announced an odd new promotion. 50,000 additional seats will be made available for rewards in BA’s Club World cabin, but only until 2 December, 2018 and only for flights between 16 December 2018 and 31 March 2019.
The routes included are:
To/From London Gatwick:
- Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Jose (Costa Rica), New York JFK and Mauritius
To/From London Heathrow:
- Abuja, Accra, Amman, Atlanta, Austin, Bahrain, Baltimore, Bangalore, Beijing, Beirut, Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Calgary, Cape Town, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Dubai, Durban, Houston, Jeddah, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait, Lagos, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Miami, Montreal, Moscow, Nairobi, Nashville, New Orleans, New York (JFK), New York (Newark), Philadelphia, Phoenix, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose (California), Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Seoul, Seychelles, Shanghai, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Tokyo (NRT), Toronto, Vancouver and Washington
The extra 50,000 seats are available for standard reward bookings as well as ‘upgrading using Avios’ from World Traveller Plus to Club World.
What’s Going On?
It’s not clear whether these seats will be distributed evenly across dates/routes, or whether BA are just trying to make a big deal about releasing seats that it is struggling to sell. I suspect that these seats might also become available to BA’s Oneworld partner airlines.
The biggest beneficiaries will probably be Executive Club members with a 2-for-1 voucher from American Express. If you were still waiting to spend your 90,000 Avios bonus from Iberia Plus, you might also be more able to spend them on BA flights via Iberia Plus.
It does seem strange, however, that there are no discounts involved. You will simply have an improved, limited-time only opportunity to pay “full price” for a British Airways reward. This is an indirect admission that BA isn’t releasing enough reward seats to match the number of Avios it is issuing…
Nonetheless, if you’ve been itching to book a Club World reward this winter and couldn’t find the award space, it’s time to take another look…
You can find the promotion T&Cs by clicking here.
I have an alert set up for a few routes mentioned and nothing has been released on said routes from the beginning of 2019 until March.
Are all 50,000 supposed to have been released immediately or might it be staggered?
A Flyertalk thread suggests that the extra seats were released on Monday evening. I had a quick check at Vancouver and it’s now wide open in March on ba.com, but nothing through Alaska miles.
Which leads me to suggest that an ExpertFlyer alert might not trigger and you should check manually…
Thanks. I use BA redemption finder so I guess it might be the same issue. Dam it, my voucher runs out 25th March looks like it will be used on a poor value Euro redemption.
Same here, checked a location today and nothing for the three months.