I often say that to travel for free you need to be flexible. You may not get the best times for flights, you may need to connect or you may need to leave from a different airport rather than your home airport.
However, today I encountered a new instance in which I need to be quite flexible because I used miles to book a flight.
Let me give you the details, from the British Airways Lounge at Heathrow, where I am spending my day…
Rob and I left last night from JFK (heading to Milan via Heathrow) on our BUSINESS CLASS tickets that I booked using Avios and a free travel together ticket, ultimately saving $4,741. However, I don’t know what I was thinking when I booked the flight from Heathrow to Milan. Our flight from NY-Heathrow was scheduled to land at 8:20AM and our flight from London to Milan was due to leave at 9:20AM. Even with everything going smoothly at JFK (shockingly), we still landed and deplaned at about 8:30 and didn’t even hit our next terminal till about 9am (not to mention we needed to go through security again). Needless to say, we missed our flight.
We got on line with many other passengers and learned that we were automatically rebooked tonight on another flight at 6:35pm. We asked to change it to an earlier flight but we could not because we were limited to seats that were available to be booked using Avios because that is how we booked our original ticket. The first flight that had seats available for Avios bookings was at 6:35 pm.
I then inquired about purchasing flights from Heathrow to Milan on an earlier flight. At that time I learned that If I do not take any leg of my itinerary, I automatically forfeit the rest of my FREE itinerary. So purchasing a flight was not an option.
So I find myself in the British Airways lounge (which I have complimentary access with my Business class tickets), writing about what I learned and knowing that I am still willing to trade flexibility for free travel. It comes with the territory!