Quick tip about booking NYC or DC flights with Avios

There are a few cities that have multiple airports, so this tip could work for:

New York (JFK, LGA, EWR) – NYC
Washington, DC (IAD, DCA, BWI) – WAS
Chicago (ORD, MDW) – CHI
London (LHR, LGW, LCY) – LON
Paris (ORY, CDG) – PAR
Tokyo (NRT, HND) – TYO

I encountered this when searching BA.com for space to get to Boston from New York.

When I search for award space, I usually just type in “NYC” – because I’m open to JFK or LGA. So I rarely specify an airport.

But BA.com will not give you the complete picture of award space if you don’t specify an airport. 

Make sure you search city code and airport code

Here’s what comes up when I simply search “NYC-BOS” for award space next week.

The search starts with “NYC”

Decent amount of space

OK, so not dismal. Like, I’d probably be fine to choose 1 of these flights from the list.

BA.com isn’t showing you the full picture of award space. 

If you go click the “Change” button at the top and specify “LGA” as your departure airport, you get many more options.

The “Change” button lets you easily switch between airports

Now specify an airport. I chose “LGA”

And then…

Many more flights!

A couple of other notes

This utility is useful in a couple of ways.

First, if you are open to multiple airports, putting in a city code can sometimes show you space that you maybe didn’t think of. Like if you’re willing to fly out of JFK, LGA, or EWR
If you want to fly New York-Paris, for example, start with “NYC.” Especially if you’re OK to fly out of EWR. Then you can switch between JFK and EWR easily to see all of the available space
If I’d started out the example search above with LGA, I wouldn’t have known that I had two JFK flights to choose from, too
Being able to switch between airports gives you a better picture of space at each airport – and sometimes more options
This tip works with any city with multiple airports whose Oneworld space shows up on the British Airways website (That was a long sentence with a lot of prepositional phrases.)

5/25: Update regarding award space availability – and further proof that this works

A couple of people noted that NO econ award space is available is my example screen shots above. My fault, really. I picked a date a few days into the future in the original 5/24 post.

I ran another search today and selected a date about 2 weeks away – June 10th – and found award availability was great on nearly every flight – with over a dozen flights to choose from.

The search starts with “NYC” again (for June 10th)

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