Why on earth would you pay £386 for seats, are you crazy? That’s the first thing people ask when they read our story featured on thisismoney. It’s the story of how we booked non-refundable seats on a British Airways flight, cancelled (and rebooked) our flight and with the help of Helen Dewdney aka The Complaining Cow actually got these non-refundable flights refunded in full. Excellent result.
The other question we are asked is ‘Exactly how did you do this? It’s non refundable’ – I will post a full article detailing exactly how over the weekend. It may help a few others stuck in a similar situation.
So back to the seats. Right, we booked our Return Club World tickets to San Francisco using Avios, and a BA 2-4-1 voucher. One of the reasons we book with Avios is because of the flexibility. You can cancel up to 48 hours before departure for a small fee. We have learnt from experience that you never know what could happen to your plans. Booking with money (apart from being very expensive) means that if you have to cancel, you only get the taxes refunded. Yep pretty much lose all your money.
For us, the journey is just as important as the destination, your holiday does not begin when you land, it starts as soon as you think of booking a trip. We maximise Joy and maximise value in every part of our trip.
I love flying, the whole experience from checking in to getting out of the airport in a new country. Taz, on the other hand tolerates flying, he sometimes almost ‘enjoys’ it. So it is really important for us to have the best, smoothest, most pleasant flying experience possible.
We had a choice of flights, with different aircraft types. We chose the A380 plane. I am a bit of a plane geek so for me this was really exciting. The A380 is the worlds largest passenger aircraft – it is a DOUBLE DECKER plane. I wanted to go on a double decker plane. Not just go on a double decker plane but go upstairs in a double decker plane. How fab. Daft to some people, sure but #SmallJoy to me. The A380 also has some of the twin seats which together convert into a bed (it’s an 11 hour night flight coming back). They make a double bed. Another #SmallJoy – sleeping in a double bed on a plane. A.Mazing.
I headed to seatguru. This site is fab, it gives you the seat layout for all the aircraft, you just put in your flight number and it shows you which to choose, why and which to avoid. From this we saw that upstairs had fewer seats, none of them were ‘doubles’ there were only a few ‘doubles’ downstairs too, in the central aisle. I chose carefully – upstairs, the 2 with the most space around them and downstairs 2 together in the aisle. Fab. The British Airways seat reservation fee total was £386, ouch, but can you see how it totally maximised our joy. It’s a very long flight, and we saved thousands on the tickets. This was worth it to us for sure.
Still think it’s crazy?
We have rebooked the flights, for a bit later in the year. With Avios, the 2-4-1 voucher and in club world. We haven’t rebooked the seats though. Who knows what will happen between now and then. A friend of mine has to cancel his dream family trip to Florida as his sadly his beloved dog is ill. His insurance won’t cover the cancellation as ‘a dog is not a close family member’ and Virgin want £150 per person change fee plus the fare difference. Or he loses £1,500 if he cancels. Outrageous and morally wrong but that’s what you need to be prepared for if you book flights with money.
We keep checking on British Airways ‘Manage my booking’ to see what seats are already booked, and we will book them if we need to. If not we can chose our seats for free 24 hours before departure, so this time we may set our alarm and take our chances.
Also in this series is Part 1 – ‘What British Airways do well‘ and Part 2 – ‘What British Airways need to do better’ and coming soon is ‘How we got a refund for non-refundable seats’. Subscribe to be get updates when we post.
Do you pay for seats or leave it to chance? Do you love flying like me or not really like Taz? Let us know Tx
The post Pay £386 for seats! Why that’s not crazy appeared first on Mind over Money Matters.