Well that was predictable … my experience trying to get a ticket on the BA x Amex 25th Anniversary Flight

Updated at 10:00 Thursday 16th July

We have had a statement from an IAG Loyalty spokesperson:

"As you know Avios-Only flight to New York sold out yesterday afternoon following exceptional demand. Customers who registered their interest can still join a waitlist on our website should any tickets become available through cancellations.

We know customers experienced technical issues accessing the booking page, due to the very high volumes of booking requests. We're sorry for the inconvenience this caused."

Original Article

We've been talking about this flight since June. A one-off, Avios-only charter to New York to mark 25 years of the BA Amex partnership, tickets from 25,000 Avios return with zero cash to pay, a private drinks party at One Vanderbilt, and a helicopter transfer thrown in for passengers in First.

On paper it's the best redemption BA and Amex have put out in years. In practice, this afternoon was a mess, and BA, Avios and Amex need to hear that plainly.

Midday: logged on, and straight into a wall

Booking opened at 12 noon BST today, 15 July. I was logged in early, link open, refresh finger ready, exactly as every guide (including our own haha) told readers to be. Instead of a booking page, I got error messages. Not one, not two. A rolling wall of them, for over an hour.

By 13:10 the errors finally cleared enough to let me into the booking flow. Relief lasted about as long as it took to click through to confirm the seat, at which point the page threw a 404 error message. A dead link, on the day BA and Amex had spent a month telling their own cardholders to clear their diary for.

13:25: back in, and straight to "sold out"

Ten minutes later I got back in properly. This time the site behaved, sort of. I went through the full booking journey for World Traveller: cabin selection, passenger details, the works. Only after I had said, "Yes, take my Avios and my will to live" did it become clear economy was gone. Sold out, after I'd already invested the time to get that far.

Call that what it is: an hour and a half of spent staring at error screens and dead ends, for a product that was gone before most people ever saw the cabin selection page.

We weren't the only ones

Our inbox, DMs, and your comments on our posts tell the same story, over and over. We were inundated, and understandably you guys are feeling let down. Readers who'd built their whole day around this booking window. People who had transferred or held onto Avios specifically for this flight, now sitting on points with nothing to show for the two hour period. Some people had even paid the £50 to transfer over Avios into their account so they could book.

Several told us they rang the BA Gold line for help, only to be met with an automated message confirming that BA already knew the booking link was broken. So BA knew, but left everyone else to find out the hard way.

That's the bit that stings most. This wasn't a surprise system failure. It was a known fault, on a headline product, that nobody thought to warn cardholders about before they burned their lunch break on it. All it would have taken was one quick email or error message explaining it. Because they managed to throw up the below bespoke error message.

Shock.

The silence afterwards

As of writing, there's been no public acknowledgement from BA, Avios or Amex. No holding statement, no apology, no clarity on how the waitlist is actually going to work. For a flight built entirely around goodwill and loyalty, that silence is doing more damage than the outage itself.

And if I am honest, I am amazed it was allowed to get this far. We know that BA's ageing IT systems are problematic at best, downright a liability at worst. I wouldn't want to be in that debrief meeting with Amex UK. Having spent a decade in the Commercial world, looking after high end sponsors for various international events, I know precisely how this meeting is going to play out, and it's bringing me out in a rash.

A word of advice, if anyone from BA, Avios or Amex are reading this. For all of our sakes, next time you do this sort of ticketing thing, please just do a ballot or just some form of queue. If it's good enough for Wimbledon, it's good enough for you. Perhaps set the 30th anniversary as the deadline for this project?

Why this happened, and why it was never going to go smoothly

None of this is really about bad luck. It's about legacy infrastructure being asked to do something it was never built for. BA and Avios booking systems are old, patched together over years, and creak under normal reward-seat demand. Point a tsunami of BA Amex cardholders at a single link, at a single second, for a truly once-in-25-years redemption, and you're not testing a website. You're stress-testing a system that everyone in the points world already knew couldn't take it.

We wanted this to be a lovely story. A proper thank-you to loyal cardholders, well executed, generous, memorable. Instead it became a case study in what happens when a good idea outpaces the technology meant to deliver it.

What we'd like to see from BA, Avios and Amex

An honest acknowledgement that this went wrong would be a start. So would clarity on how the waitlist is done, given how many people were fighting broken links rather than a fair queue. And some goodwill gesture for the cardholders who lost their lunchtime to this, not because anyone's owed a prize for trying to book a flight, but because loyalty programmes only work if the loyalty runs both ways.

If you registered, got through, and actually secured a seat this morning, well done, and we'd love to hear how you did it. If you're one of the many who didn't, you're not alone, and it wasn't down to anything you did wrong, but let us know how you're feeling in the comments.

We'll update this piece if BA, Avios or Amex say anything official.

Helena

Points Well Made is a passion project from Sam and Helena. If you've enjoyed this and want to help us keep the lights on, please consider buying us a Ko-fi or subscribing monthly. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for more of the same. Thanks for reading.