As reported by TravelUpdate.com, British Airways appear to be offering bad value upgrade offers on their flights but what exactly is going on here? I decided to give it a go on some of my upcoming booked flights.

For those who aren’t in the know, British Airways pro-actively offer paid upgrades using cash through the “Manage My Booking” function on BA.com. Once you are logged into your flight booking, you’ll notice something like the below - which may be attractive particularly for those looking for a little more privacy or free food.

Click through and you’ll then be taken to a screen where they confirm the “special” upgrade offer. Note the outbound (on Iberia) offers an upgrade price of GBP 135 per passenger and the inbound offer is GBP 99 per passenger.

The problem here comes that also in the “Manage My Booking” function, there is another area where you can upgrade under “Change Booking” at the top of the page.

Once you click through, you’ll be given the option to change the date of the booking - but also your fare class from Economy Hand Baggage Only, Economy with Hold Baggage, Premium Economy (on relevant flights), Business & First (where applicable). In this case, you’ll see that the upgrade offered here - which is just a straight fare change, not a special offer - is a big difference in price. On the Iberia outbound, the difference is GBP 48 per person less and GBP 24 less on the BA inbound - which is not to be sniffed at and could go towards a nice meal or hotel room.

I decided to do a little more investigation. As a general rule of thumb, my booked European short-haul flights often came up cheaper to upgrade via the Change Booking versus Upgrade function. On long-haul flights, BA doesn’t offer the change booking functionality in the same manner - only allowing me to change the booking to another flight in the same class. The Upgrade function offered a change to Premium Economy at GBP 149 - which would only be upgradable via a phone call otherwise.

What’s going on here?

I suspect this is a case of two IAG (the owner of British Airways) teams that are managing two separate parts of the booking process. The “Change Booking” function likely is managed by the regular bookings team whereas “Upgrades” is likely managed by the team that is focussed on the post-booking process to extract more revenue per passenger through targeted pre-flight offers. In effect, there is going to be two different systems that are feeding both the functions causing the discrepancy in pricing.

How can you avoid paying extra?

The better fix would be that British Airways IT would streamline the data sources and show the more competitive price, but that is unlikely to happen. Instead, for now, you’ll likely need to check between the two in order to determine which one is going to be the cheapest method for upgrading. This isn’t ideal, but regardless it can help you upgrade for less.