British Airways and Royal Jordanian are oneworld alliance partners. This means BA frequent flyers can redeem Avios points on RJ and it’s been that way for years. However, right now it seems some award availability is hiding from view.
The only route where the two airlines compete is London Heathrow to Amman and BA has a vastly inferior product on the route. They operate European configured short-haul aircraft, while RJ use the Boeing 787 with lie-flat seats in business class and inflight entertainment screens throughout.
Who Is Hiding The Award Availability?
Usually there is plenty of award space on Royal Jordanian when doing an Avios search from London Heathrow to Amman and return. It wasn’t very difficult to find and in fact, I wrote about how much cheaper it was to redeem on RJ versus BA on the route, for that vastly superior product.
I was searching multiple dates throughout 2024 and only the British Airways service is coming up for non-stop flights. Royal Jordanian are offered with connections via Paris, Frankfurt, Paris, Istanbul – but never the direct flight.
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- No flight from London Heathrow on RJ!
Interestingly, the upcoming new RJ service from London Stansted to Amman is appearing quite happily when you use LON as your starting point. That means there is no issue with the connectivity between the two airline’s systems.
Have British Airways put the RJ Heathrow service into hiding? Have Royal Jordanian decided to give no availability on their Heathrow flights in the hope that passengers booking award flights will use Stansted? It’s a mystery!
Overall Thoughts
Airline frequent flyer programmes always try to skew your points spending in favour of your own airline. It’s why partner redemptions are often priced higher than booking with your home carrier. It keeps all the business in house.
Still, this is an interesting one, as I can’t see any reason to do this. People will want to go from Heathrow on RJ over BA, so my suspicion is that it is BA hiding things here. That being said, it could be RJ… curious!
What do you think is going on here? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Mark Harkin via Wikimedia Commons.
A quick search on other OneWorld sites show the same availability. BA is not hiding RJ award, it’s RJ who hasn’t released seats to their partners
Thank you for that… I wonder why. Perhaps they do actually want people to book the STN flight instead using points. Curiouser and curiouser! Appreciate you checking that out.
What’s the big deal. Airlines (like any business) make decisions in their own self interest (as they should). If an airline doesn’t release award seats to alliance partners or an airline decides to prioritize their flights over their partners that is THEIR decision solely. They don’t owe FF members anything. If you don’t like it find another airline or program to follow. The level of entitlement and self interest in the points/miles community with apparently zero understanding of business or economics is crazy. People it isn’t all about you and please quit whining about lack of flight availability, devaluations or… Read more »
Oh, I completely understand your point. My degree is in business, so I understand most of the decisions from a commercial perspective. I’m just someone who likes to know what is going on, which, of course, never happens due to things being commercially sensitive. You are correct around the entitlement among certain frequent flyers, it even shocks me at times. Thanks for the comment!
Bigger scandal is how since BA downgraded flights to Amman and Cairo to medium haul, i.e. only 80 tier points in Business, that RJ too now only award 80 tier points when flying from LHR to Amman. This is despite a RJ flight from Amsterdam for example still being 140 tier points in Business.
Yes, that is a travesty. I also hear the STN-AMM is 140 as well. It’s ridiculous that BA compete with Club Europe versus RJ with full international service. I’m sure it does wonders for their bottom line, but they’re not exactly European destinations. TLV is still long haul proper as well. It’s really annoying!