Introduction
I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t get much done last Thursday due to that crazy BA fare – you know, the one that broke our side of the internet, where you could get biz class fares to Europe for less than $500 + 30K Avios. I was actually surprised the deal lasted ~14 hours. The deal surfaced at around midnight, and one of my buddies was about to wake me up for it. Quick aside – I’m buddies with 2 other “travel hackers” and we’ve instituted a system where if there is a hot deal be it mistake fare or an AMEX Staples offer, we’ll call each other to wake us up. I suggest you set up a similar system; think of it like a grown up buddy system. Anyway, I didn’t actually dig into this deal until it was discovered you could get it for less than $500 (probably around 10AM PST). Here’s how I booked it:
AARP
Well, first off, I learned that AARP was open to all ages (I guess they can’t discriminate membership based on age.) So I initially signed up for AARP, but I wanted them to ‘mail me a bill.’ I thought this was a nice workaround to get the AARP discount w/o paying for AARP. I found out shortly that wasn’t possible when the BA site said I had to have an active paying membership. So I paid the $16 for the 1 year membership. Unfortunately, while DansDeals reported it was instant, I thought that maybe me signing up for ‘mail me my bill’ had confused the system and it didn’t register. Later I learned that others had issues too with new memberships not registering on the BA site. Luckily, I was able to sign in.
Which airport to fly out of
Since the deal was only out of certain airports and I’m based in Seattle, I knew I was going to have to position myself. I knew my best chance was either LAX or DFW or ORD. I’m not sure why but my buddies suggested flying out of DFW (we didn’t even talk about ORD for some reason.) Maybe because the planes out of DFW were newer? Anyway, most people would have just booked DFW-LHR-DFW, but you could do a multi-city itinerary whereby your flight would be DFW-LHR-SEA-DFW and not fly the last SEA-DFW portion. This was possible since BA flew a LHR-SEA flight and you could fly AA from SEA-DFW. So that was ticket #1.
Fly out of LAX
After I booked that DFW flight, I then looked at a one-way positioning flight from SEA-DFW. That was $200 a person! DOUGH! And I can’t use an AS Visa companion pass since RT is required for that. I then realized flying SEA-LAX is usually $100 OW. Therefore, I should fly out of LAX instead of DFW to save on the positioning flight. Plus, I learned BA flies their A380 on the LAX-LHR route. So that was ticket #2 – LAX-LHR-LAX. Now you must be wondering why I didn’t do an LAX-LHR-SEA-LAX just like I did with ticket #1 to save on the return leg. Well, that’s when we found out that to get the deal, you couldn’t fly on Alaska or even Iberia metal. So while AA codeshares SEA-LAX, it’s actually on Alaska metal. There is no AA metal on the SEA-LAX route. Therefore, since you can’t book Alaska metal flights on BA, I couldn’t even search for SEA-LAX, which means I couldn’t book LAX-LHR-SEA-LAX.
A roundtrip is made up of 2 OW segments
After I booked the LAX-LHR-LAX ticket and we had learned about the inability to book SEA-LAX, a buddy mentioned that a BA roundtrip ticket consists of 2 one-way flights. So he was suggesting I try to book LAX-LHR and return LHR-SEA-DFW. I had assumed my return city and departure city had to be the same, and I didn’t even consider ending my trip in DFW. Well, anyway, by the time I was trying to price this out, that’s when the AARP discount wasn’t working anymore for my dates and the deal was sorta dead. If anyone knows of this was possible, let me know in the comments.
Cancelling ticket #1
By the time I got home, the US call center was closed. I used Skype to call up the Japanese BA call center. I was able to cancel ticket #1 without penalty. I’ll use an AS companion pass for that SEA-LAX RT, which hopefully should cost me $200 + $100 + taxes. I’ll wait until next year since there’s no rush to book it now.
Lessons Learned
While this deal is dead, here are some lessons learned for the next fare like this:
- Set up some kind of alert system with other people (one that might involve waking you up)
- Book first, think later! I had told friends to book their tickets, but they had to ‘check their schedules.’ Well the deal was dead by then.
- Think about multi-city throwaway-ticketing for your return leg
- Think about returning to a city that is not your origin city.
- If possible, have points available in multiple currencies. I know this isn’t easy for everyone, but I was able to book these flights because I had 120K of BA points ready to go (I had xferr’ed these with the MR bonus before the AMEX deval earlier this year).