55 Minutes and $300 Get Us Two More Days In Rio
Back in September, I booked flights for our family to take a vacation so South America. Chrissy and I both had over 100,000 British Airways miles from the Chase BA Visa offer at the beginning of the summer. With the expected upcoming changes to the British Airways Executive Club, the general feeling was that it was better to use those miles than to have them sitting in an account when the program switched over. South America was a great redemption option under the old BA program, so I started looking for flights. It was somewhat tough putting together an itinerary since we needed four seats on every flight, but I was finally able to piece together the following itinerary and it looked pretty good.
Flight number: LA533
From: NEW YORK – JOHN F KENNEDY Terminal 4
To: SANTIAGO – A MERINO BENITEZ Terminal INTL
Depart: 14 Jun 2012 19:40
Arrive: 15 Jun 2012 06:30
Operated by: LAN CHILE
Flight number: LA750
From: SANTIAGO – A MERINO BENITEZ Terminal INTL
To: RIO DE JANEIRO – INTL Terminal 1
Depart: 16 Jun 2012 08:15
Arrive: 16 Jun 2012 14:50
Operated by: LAN CHILE
Flight number: LA751
From: RIO DE JANEIRO – INTL Terminal 1
To: SANTIAGO – A MERINO BENITEZ Terminal INTL
Depart: 20 Jun 2012 15:35
Arrive: 20 Jun 2012 20:55
Operated by: LAN CHILE
Flight number: LA532
From: SANTIAGO – A MERINO BENITEZ Terminal INTL
To: NEW YORK – JOHN F KENNEDY Terminal 4
Depart: 25 Jun 2012 21:20
Arrive: 26 Jun 2012 08:10
Operated by: LAN CHILE
We were pretty limited in what days we could fly on, probably mostly because lots of other people were also trying to burn BA miles and there were not a lot of award seats available. At the time of booking, I would have liked to spend a few more days in Rio instead of Santiago, but we took what we could find. B Available flights into and out of Rio had the least amount of availability, so we pretty much scheduled around them. On the way down, we decided to spend a night in Santiago instead of connecting straight through to Rio. After a 10 hour 50 minute flight in coach, I think all of us will want to stretch out our legs for a while before hopping on another plane. I think that the kids will be ok on the JFK-Santiago flight, but another flight an hour later might be asking to much of them. The flight back from Rio to Santiago was the only available option within 2-3 days on either side of that, so we didn’t have much choice about how long we would spend there.
Since then, we have done some research on the two cities and uncovered some useful information. We will be in Rio, for example, at the same time as a UN Conference. Although I don’t think this will be a huge problem, it will certainly effect certain things, including availability of hotel rooms. Santiago, it seems, would be a better place to visit in June if we didn’t have the kids with us. We would love to visit some of the local wineries and possibly ski for a day, but neither is a great option with the kids. The more we read, the more we think we will have more time than we want in Santiago.
So last night, I went on the British Airways site to see if any other options had opened up. To my surprise, there were 4 seats available from Rio to Santiago almost every day. After a brief talk with Chrissy and a quick check of the change fees, I called British Airways to make a change. Now if you have never called british airways about an award booking, you should know that it is not a quick process. It was a solid 20 minutes before I got someone on the phone (this is actually pretty quick for a BA call) and I was on the phone for another 35 minutes after that making the necessary flight change. If you ever need to call British Airways from the US, make sure you have plenty of time available to make the call.
Since I had made this reservation under the old program, I am only allowed to change times and dates of flights. If I want to change the destinations, the entire itinerary must be re-priced under the new program rules. Luckily, I just wanted to change a flight date, because re-pricing would make this award 70k miles each instead of the 40k we paid. I mentioned before that I had looked at the change fees before calling, but of course those are the fees for the new program, so things were different when we got to actually paying for the change.
The man I spoke with was very nice and I think about as efficient as BA will let him be. He pulled up our flights, two under my account and two under Chrissy’s, and confirmed that the flights I wanted on the 22nd were available. He then notified me that the change fee would be $70 a person, instead of the $40 under the current program. I agreed and he said that before finalizing the changes, he would need to check with their rate desk to see if the taxes and fees would change. Several minutes later, he came back and told me that the taxes and fees went up $5.10 per person. I again agreed to the charge and he went on to take my credit card information. When he put me on hold to process the credit card, I am not sure what took so long. I don’t know if their system is really that incredibly slow or if I will find in a couple of weeks that he went on a shopping spree on Amazon with my credit card. Of course I am just kidding about that last part (I hope), but it really did take quite a while for him to come back and say the changes had been confirmed.
The call ended with the BA representative telling me that Chrissy and I would be receiving email confirmations of the change and thanking me for calling British Airways. Not that I am terribly surprised, but neither Chrissy or I have received this email confirmation yet. I am going to give it a couple of days and check my itinerary online before I make another hour long call to see why. For now, I will assume that the change has been made correctly and start planning accordingly.
The important thing that you should learn here is that award seat availability is changing all the time. You won’t always find the most seats by booking early or waiting until the last minute. We are now 3 1/2 months away from our trip, and there were far more available flights than there were at 9 months. If you can’t get the flights or dates that you want when you first look, make sure to keep checking back. You never know what might open up and even if you have already booked, it will often only cost you a relatively small fee to change to your preferred itinerary.
I guess I will end with a couple of questions for all of you. Do you think that the extra two days in Rio will be worth the $300 I had to spend to get them? I feel that for my family’s situation, the price we paid was easily worth what we got, but I would love to hear the opinions of others. Would you spend $300 just to adjust an itinerary by a few days? In addition, what would you do with those two extra days? Is there anything that we just can’t miss on our first trip to Rio, or for that matter, our first trip to Santiago? Let me know in the comments and help us to get the most out of our first family trip to South America.
