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Today our family of Iberia accounts got a stream of cancels for Iberia flights booked to earn Avios in the 90k promotion. The flights themselves have canceled, not just our bookings.
Others are reporting the same.
For us they are evening Santander-Madrid flights that have dropped off the schedule. These are flights probably filled with people not likely to show up.
The terms of that promotion were that to keep the promotional Avios you had to book flights and not cancel them. There was no requirement to take the flights.
Where Are Your Promotional Avios Sitting?
The deadline to use the promotional Avios was December 1, 2018, so people are in one of four groups:
- Redeemed all the Avios for flights or other awards and have already used the awards.
- Redeemed all the Avios for flights or other award and have not used the awards.
- Transferred the Avios to British Airways/Aer Lingus/Avios.com and have a negative Iberia balance.
- Lost Avios due to expiration on December 1, 2018.
We are in the second group, with upcoming travel in February and early May. The Iberia flight cancels for us are for mid to late May.
Next Move?
What to do?
- Do nothing
- Accept a schedule change to a different flight (seems no auto-rebooking)
- Ask for a refund
It would be cheeky to ask for a refund and hilarious after all this to get the money back, too.
More than the original money, we want to fly the awards we booked for travel on American Airlines and don’t want to risk those being canceled.
Readers, what say you?
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what happen when you use promotional 90k to book a trip and have to cancel the trip do you lose the points or do you get it reddposit to use at later date
@lin – if you cancel they are gone. Even using non-promotional Avios, there are no change or cancels on partner awards, only on Iberia awards.
what happened in the end?
@shlomo – they refunded all these upon me calling, in the end I got jealous of a friend who went 10/10 cancels refunds!
Dealing with Iberia Corporate and CS, and the Iberia website, since Day 1 of this promotion has been exasperating and deflating. I booked 10 flights (for about $440 all in) — I am 100% intending to fly them during three months of travel in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Morocco. They awarded me 81,000 miles, not 90,000. When I called to ask after the missing 9,000, the CSR told me that “while you were waiting for miles to post, Iberia changed the terms of the promotion, and you actually have to fly that flight to earn the miles.” But they… Read more »
I’d do nothing, and see how Iberia handles it. In theory, you have right up until the day of the flight to rebook, so I’d want to fly the awards I booked and then see how things shake out.
How to request a refund?
If i request refund because of this cancelation? Will they take away the miles?
@Adam – I don’t know and am not going to be the first data point. Others are already requesting refunds.
Interesting to see that they were smart enough to actually cancel those flights. While I think this whole story has been very dumb on their side, it is smart to cancel flying planes that don’t have passengers….
This article is incredibly poorly written. It provides no background information and assumes that the reader has all kinds of prior knowledge about how a particular Iberia promotion works. No information is provided as to what to do, or how to avoid similar problems in the future.
@Charles Baker – I asked the question because I don’t have the answer. This Iberia promotion was one of a kind and expired. I doubt we’ll see such a promotion again, specifically, one where the bonus miles are awarded for booking tickets before flying them. Anyone impacted knows the background. Anyone not impacted can’t become impacted.
[…] Iberia 90k Promotion Qualifying Flight Cancellations – What to Do? by Rapid Travel Chai. I think that accepting any schedule change/doing nothing should work. […]