Welcome to the Travel Abstract Academy Guide to Maximizing your British Airways Avios Points.
Today marks the first lesson in the Travel Academy Guide to Avios Points.
Part I in the series, is focused on Searching and Booking British Airways Partner Airline Award Flights.
British Airways Partner Airlines
Below you will find a list of all of British Airways’ partner airlines along with their respective Hub City/Airports and if it is a subsidiary of a larger carrier displayed in parentheses:
- AirBerlin (Berlin/Dusseldorf)
- American Airlines (Dallas/Miami/NYC/LAX/Chicago)
- American Eagle (Dallas/Miami/NYC/LAX/Chicago, AA)
- Cathay Pacific (Hong Kong)
- Dragonair (Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific)
- Finnair (Helsinki)
- Iberia Airlines (Madrid)
- Japan Airlines (Tokyo/Osaka)
- LAN Airlines (Santiago)
- LAN Peru (Lima, LAN)
- LAN Argentina (Buenos Aires, LAN)
- Malaysia Airlines (Kuala Lumpur)
- Niki Airlines (Vienna, airberlin)
- Qantas Airways (Sydney/Melbourne)
- Royal Jordanian Airlines (Amman)
- S7 Airlines (Moscow)
There are certain limitations to BA’s website that you will run into when booking on airlines other than BA itself.
BA will only offers you a seat on the partner airlines when BA metal is unavailable at the requested date or does not fly the desired route.
You will notice this feature in Step 2, where you will be able to select “include partners” because BA metal does not fly the route I am trying to book.
So After you have those 100k BA Avios Points how do you search and book a flight?
Let me show you.
Step 1: Searching Award Space on Partner Airline Website
If you want to avoid the hassle of blindly searching for Reward Flight space you can go to your carriers website, in this example AA.com, to make sure there are flights available. This will give you great practice for booking a partner airline reward flight without the hassle of hunting down for the right dates and routing.
In my example I search one of my favorite routes, JFK (New York City) to EZE (Buenos Aires), on AA.com:
Step 2: Finding Award Space on British Airways
As with any website that you are new to the British Airways website layout might be a bit confusing for you first timers. However its search reward flight search engine more than makes up for this small failing.
The work we did on AA (dot) com really pays off in this step because knowing partner reward flights are available for our dates simplified our process of searching BA.com for the same awards a bit slower because British Airways only shows award flight inventory one week at a time while AA shows a full months worth at once.
In order to avoid this problem of searching BA.com week by week you should always use AA.com to find a day with MileSAAver award space before using your British Airways Avios points to book your award flight.
Step 3: Choosing Partner Award Flight on BA.com
Great job getting to the flight options page but you are not in the clear yet. Watch out for flights that are marketed as “direct” but have longer flight times than other direct flights. I have found that the automatic flight they select for you is not always the best and you should watch out for those subtle differences.
If you have connecting flights make sure you double check your time between flights to give yourself enough time to make the switch.
Step 4: British Airways Avios Points Payment Options
I pay for the partner airline reward flight with the least amount of Avios Points as possible because I always like to stretch my points/miles to the max. Many times this will also increase the cpm redemption value of your Avios Points giving you more reward flight for your dollar. If you just want to use up your Avios Points and want to hold onto as much cash as possible then I would suggest going full throttle with the Avios Point payment option.
This method of booking can be applied to all of the airlines mentioned above. Some times the online booking engine will just will not show you the partner airline inventory you want no matter what tricks you try.
This is when you are forced to call the BA booking service. If you do, make sure to tell the BA agent that their website had errors and was not working properly. This will get the telephone charge for booking a flight waived.
For those times when searching for award travel can be a bit grueling on the airlines websites you can use third party websites which search award space across a majority of airlines in the world today. They range from subscription sites like expertflyer.com and KVS Tool to an independent pay as you go service offered by Award Nexus.
I use expertflyer and KVS Tool the most but they are each close to $100 per year for full access. Expertflyer does have some of their features for free but the award search feature is not included.
Stay tuned all this week as I continue to go over how to maximize your Avios Points.
To Your Award Flight Success!