British Airways’ shopping portal is offering 12 points per dollar spent at Nordstrom, though they’re also presently running a promotion whereby triple Avios points will be award on your first qualifying purchase of more than $50 in a single transaction at Nordstrom, for a total of 36 points per dollar spent at Nordstrom. While Avios points aren’t nearly as valuable as they were before the devlauation, you still have to value them at around a cent or so each, which makes this a 36% discount in the form of miles for Nordstrom shopping.

So the initial offer is:

And then the bonus offer is:

To access the shopping portal, first go to ba.com and log in to your British Airways Executive Club account.

Then on the next page select “Collecting Avios.”

Then on the next page select “Shopping.”

Then on the final page select “Shop with BA eStore now,” which should take you to their shopping portal.

The key is that once you select Nordstrom as the partner you want to shop with, you’ll have to enter promotion code NORDX3 on the following page:

And that should be it. Just make sure you make a single purchase of more than $50 and use the promotion code, and if you want to be on the safe side, even take screenshots. I can’t imagine they’re intending to be this generous, so if you’re interested I would take advantage of this offer sooner rather than later.

(Tip of the hat to The Points Guy)

To celebrate the new year, British Airways is offering a fare sale for $2,012 all-in business class fares from the US to London, Manchester, or Edinburgh for bookings made through December 9, 2011 (Friday). Travel must commence between December 20, 2011, and January 5, 2012, and must be completed by January 8, 2012.

This sale is pretty amazing because there really are very few strings attached. Availability is excellent, so it’s easy to get this fare out of just about any US airport and pay $2,012 all-in.

The other cool thing is that the fare is valid on American as well. The nice thing about American is that if you book a discounted business class ticket you can upgrade to first class using a systemwide upgrade, of which top tier elites get eight each year.

I have to say, this is a mildly tempting way to kick off status requalification for next year in comfort…

Anyone taking advantage of this?

This morning I posted the details of British Airways’ new frequent flyer program, Avios. Well, I posted the details to the extent I could make sense of them, which wasn’t all that much!

Then a couple of hours later I posted suggesting that Avios awards weren’t pricing correctly based on the new published rates. As I showed, the Avios award calculator suggests that New York to London to Barcelona should cost 60,000 miles one-way in first class. I mean, how much clearer can it be?

Let me mention in particular the first highlighted point above, which reads “Prices shown are the lowest based on a one-way journey, with up to one connection (on BA flights only).”

Yeah, one thing they forgot to mention. They lied. Each segment prices individually, which is why this award costs 75,000 miles — 60,000 miles for first class from New York to London, and 15,000 miles for business class from London to Barcelona. So very quietly British Airways has eliminated the concept of the “free” stopover, since you’re charged separately for each segment. The above isn’t just a typo, but an outright contradiction.

But here’s what I find truly hilarious ridiculous. Check out the “answers” that the British Airways Executive Club representative on FlyerTalk provided us with.

Remember how British Airways advertised that the cost of 97% of awards would stay the same or go down? Turns out they really meant:

We did say that 97% of our flight prices got the same or better – this was for BA flights to and from London. I apologise if this was confusing and I assure you we will continue to monitor your feedback on this.

It would seem to me that this is something that would be worth disclosing at the time, no? Isn’t this considered false advertising? After all, many people may have not redeemed their miles before the changes under the expectation that most awards would go down in price or remain the same, only to find the restrictions that weren’t disclosed.

Then there’s this:

2c) Will BA ever publish a “distance band” as IB have?

Our pricing is not as straightforward as publishing a distance banded model – instead we chose to develop a calculator and our forthcoming zone map tool to help retrieve the prices for the flights you are looking for instead

Whew, I was worried for a second that I wouldn’t need a “calculator” or “tool” to figure out how many miles I would need for an award ticket. And here I was expecting the program would be “simplified.”

We have said so far that this is the beginning – we are always looking for ways to improve the Club so please continue to read our communications as they are issued

I can hardly wait to see what’s next! Perhaps you can instead develop an award chart whereby the cost of a ticket is based on whether there’s a full moon or not?

And here’s my absolute favorite:

10) Why was the partner award chart not announced in advance of the changes? Poor communication ==> poor loyalty

I think this is a fair challenge. On hindsight, I think I would have developed the Avios calculator in advance to ensure that you had access to be able to price all of the individual queries that our members had. Looking at booking behaviour at the time, I thought it would be useful to issue the prices for BA flights in and out of London and indicate that partner parallel routes would be the same price. I now see that more detail may have helped. The only thing I can offer are apologies and the explanation that we were limited in terms of development with the timescale we had.

On hindsight? On hindsight?!? British Airways, did you miss the… oh, I dunno…. thousand blog posts/articles/tweets/forum discussions begging you to disclose the new award chart upfront? If you were limited in terms of the development due to the timescale, maybe you shouldn’t have rolled out the new award chart so quickly.

I like British Airways, I really do. I think they’re a great airline. But their rollout, communication, and disclosure with these changes have been an absolute marketing failure. And that’s putting it nicely.

Am I off base?

Oy. Back in September British Airways announced they’d be “revitalising” the Executive Club program on November 16, which sounds great in theory, though they insisted they wouldn’t reveal the details until the program actually rolls on November 16, which is today. Talk about a lot of advance notice for no advance notice! It has been a very frustrating process, not just because they’re not disclosing the new chart up front, but because of all the availability issues they had over the past week or so, which I suspect might be intentional. The Executive Club call center had a busy signal almost all day yesterday, making it tough to book any awards.

Well, now that it’s November 16 and they’ve “simplified” the award chart you’d think it would be easy to find, but nope, it’s not. Instead you can just search routes and see the price, though I don’t see a single award chart yet.

The best they seem to have so far is this (somewhat useless) Avios calculator, which will tell you the price for a particular route:

If the new award chart is distance based, why the heck is it so tough for them to show us a single award chart which has the costs based on the distance flown?

They also have a zonal map, though I feel like I need another four year degree to figure out how the hell to work it.

So instead we’re forced to explore in terms of actual examples.

In looking up a few of the most popular redemptions, New York to Hong Kong to Bali one way in first class has gone from costing 75,000 miles to 130,000 miles. That’s a 73% increase!

In fairness, if you “just” want to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong one-way in first class, the cost goes from 75,000 miles to 105,000 miles, which is “only” a 40% increase.

For those in North America, seemingly the only good news is that award costs go down for travel to Europe for those on the East Coast.

New York to London goes from costing 75,000 miles one-way in first class to costing 60,000 miles (business class goes from 50,000 miles to 40,000 miles 0ne-way).

The cost of first class from New York to London to Rome one-way goes from 90,000 miles to 75,000 miles.

Anyway, enough examples, the implications here are exactly as expected — for the most part, the cost of partner redemptions for those in North America are increasing drastically, especially for LAN and Cathay Pacific routes, given how “far” they are.

That being said, the cost of many awards to Europe are going down, especially for those on the east coast.

And actually I think my September 3 post on why I’m keeping the British Airways Visa turned out to be true. If you spend $30,000 on the card annually you earn a companion voucher good for a second passenger on an award ticket (you just have to pay taxes/fees/fuel surcharges).

If you live in New York, for example, first class to London or Paris will run you 120,000 miles roundtrip in first class, plus about $800 in taxes/fees/fuel surcharges. If you’re able to earn a companion certificate every year, that’s basically a trip to London in first class for 60,000 miles plus $800 in taxes/fees per person, compared to other airlines which charge 125,000-135,000 miles, plus $300 in taxes/fees. So I’ll gladly pay the extra $500 for a savings of 65,000-75,000 miles.

Of course that only applies to those of you in that situation. On the whole the changes of course get a huge thumbs down from the perspective of a North American flyer… exactly as we expected!

I’ve quite literally lost it with this ridiculous excuse for a loyalty program. As someone that just about books award tickets for people full time, this is probably the busiest week of the year for me thanks to the British Airways devaluation that’s kicking in on November 16. Not only are they making a radical change to their loyalty program which is more or less going to destroy the award chart for those in the US, but they’re refusing to announce the new chart until November 16, which is the day it goes into effect.

Despite public outrcry they’ve remained firm on their stance without giving any sort of justification, thinking they’re somehow doing us a service by not showing us the new award chart until the day it kicks in (then again based on how bad I suspect the new chart will look, they probably are doing us a service).

So suffice it to say the British Airways Executive Club call centers are an absolute mess and the agents are grouchy as ever, as the hold times are often 30+ minutes. I can handle all that, because it’s understandable since everyone is trying to redeem their miles right now.

What I can’t handle, which has been a common theme over the past week, is that British Airways is extensively blocking partner award availability that even their own website shows!

I thought it was an isolated incident when I was trying to make a booking for a client to South America on LAN. The availability showed up on British Airways’ own search tool, yet the call center couldn’t find the space for two of the four flights. Mind you, I had the agents “direct sell” the space, which will make the space show up if it is in fact there. In the past the only place I had this issue was with Dragonair flights out of Beijing (oddly enough, it’s quite random).

But on all four British Airways awards I’ve worked on this morning, availability on the website hasn’t matched what’s actually there. This is for travel on both Cathay Pacific and LAN.

So the website will say there are eight award seats remaining, but after you enter the credit card information to make the booking, there’s an error message saying to contact Executive Club.

If it were an isolated incident that would be one thing, but of the flights I’m looking at, just about every third segment is having this issue. And it’s not that this is “phantom” award space, because Qantas also shows the space as being available. When phoning up the call center they claim the space isn’t there, which, as far as their systems are concerned, is correct.

On my last call I requested a supervisor because I wanted to bring the discrepancy to their attention, but the agent refused to transfer me — “this isn’t something that we would connect you to a supervisor for.”

Sorry, but the timing on this is just far too convenient. British Airways, are you having some widespread system meltdown or is this intentional? Or can you only answer that question after November 16?

Anyone else having the same issues?

Check out my weekly column over at TravelSort.com. This week I share tips for maximizing the value of the British Airways companion certificate for travel on British Airways, given that they’re largely devaluing their program for US based members come November 16.