SriLankan Airlines is now a member of the oneworld alliance and that opens up more several new options for redeeming your miles–particularly using points from US Airways, American Airlines, and British Airways. Perhaps most attractive of all is British Airways Avios, which offers a distance-based award chart and has already made SriLankan flights bookable on its website. Traveling within SE Asia or to the Middle East will become a strategic use of your Avios.
1. How do I search online for award space?
Log into your British Airways Executive Club account and choose award search. From there, you can specify the routing and if available, SriLankan options will show up. One thing I noticed is that if you search between LHR and CMB, space will now show up on SriLankan, you must search between LON (London all airports) and CMB instead. I am sure this is a temporary problem perhaps tied to the fact that BA serves CMB only from LGW, but in any case, all routes are searchable and bookable online.
2. Are there fuel surcharges?
No. Thus far, I am not seeing fuel surcharges when booking with BA. Taxes ex-HKG, for example, are only $15. Taxes ex-CMB are a flat $85 on a direct flight, the standard government-imposed taxes out of Sri Lanka.
3. What routes does SriLankan fly?
Canadian Kilometers put together a nice chart of SriLankan’s destinations and the Avios required for direct flights between the city shown and its hub in Colombo.
4,500 (Economy)/9,000 (Business) Avios
- Male
- Bangalore
10,000/20,000 Avios
- Delhi
- Singapore
- Kuala Lumpur
- Bangkok
- Singapore
- Mumbai
12,500/25,000 Avios
- Dubai
- Doha
- Jeddah
- Muscat
20,000/40,000 Avios
- Shanghai
- Beijing
25,000/50,000 Avios
- Paris
- London
- Rome
- Moscow
4. How much award space is being released?
Unfortunately, not much. I am not seeing more than one business class seat being released at a time on any particular flight and many flights offer no award seats at all. No business class available to/from London for all dates I searched. Further, even economy seats are in relatively short supply. But, with some flexibility, you can at least score a couple economy class seats together and if traveling solo, business is available for twice the amount of points.
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More choice is always a good thing–it is why I argued that Alaska Airlines should be part of Star Alliance even with the route overlap with United. For oneworld flyers, your award options just got even better.
where can i see best the availability on sri lankan
ba.com does not show all award space
especially from combinations like fra-cmb-bkk
@Patrick: BA ist he only website that shows space and it is best to search point to point (one search from FRA-CMB, another from CMB-BKK) using only one passenger – that way you can see all the space available. If you search for two seats and there is one business and one in economy, neither will show up.
I can get BA.com to price out an itinerary, BKK-(CMB)-MLE, for 29,000 + $46 roundtrip. However, I can’t it to book. I phoned the call center and I was quoted 29K + over $200 in taxes and fuel surcharge. Has anyone have any experience getting to book via the website?
This sucks when I can buy revenue ticket for around $400.