Companion ticket availability question

Hi,

I have a question about BA Companion tickets that you can get through the BA Amex card although I suspect the same question could also apply to VS companion tickets.

Does there need to be 2 "reward" seats available in order to use the companion ticket or do they come from a separate bucket.

Its hard enough often finding 1 seat available on many routes let alone 2 so I just wanted to check if these were actually of any use.

Also, can you use them on all classes or are they specific to Econ/PE?

I beleive there have to be 2 reward seats available on BA and you can use them on all classes, even in sales. IIRC someone on here managed to book 2 first class tickets to LA for the princely sum of 75k miles as they had the BA Amex voucher and BA did a special half price reward sale.

I myself bagged a couple of WT+ seats for St Lucia in this way (Club World were not part of the promotion)- but have had to cancel them ;-(

I supoose it differs from the VS 'companion' ticket in so far as with VS you only need to find 1 reward seat as the other ticket has to be a revenue ticket - and a fairly high ticket code at that.

So, does the BA companion ticket HAVE to be used in conjunction with another reward ticket?

You need 2 reward seats to use the companion voucher. Ultimately you are using avios points to book one ticket and your companion goes for free. You do have to pay taxes/fees for both passengers which is now fairly pricey (£400+ per person long-haul club). There is a booking tool on ba.com for redeeming your voucher, it's quite easy to use but availability is poor unless you plan well ahead.

The main difference vs Virgin companion voucher is that on BA you can only use it alongside a redemption.