I’m quite aware of the fact that I haven’t flown as many airlines as some flight reviewers out there, so I don’t usually hand out awards. However, I’m quite keen to hand one out today, after experiencing the worst IT out of any major airline website I’ve seen. It’s time to buy some prosecco and Barefoot wine and do some D-list celebrity outreach…
I’ve seen some horrendous IT in my time
I’ve flown and reviewed 150+ airline products, and have interacted with the “Manage My Booking” platform every time I’ve reviewed one of these airlines. Suffice to say that some are impressive, and some are terrible.
No, my award doesn’t go to China Eastern, even though only their Chinese app lets you manage your booking and change your seat after you select one, and signing up for their frequent flyer programme requires a Chinese ID (and even then I had a verification failure issue).
I’m lucky I know Chinese…
It’s also not KLM’s IT, where they downgraded me to economy (from premium economy) after an equipment swap, and didn’t inform me until I clicked “manage my booking” for a routine check.
Not really a cabin I’d have paid premium economy prices for
Rather, the worst IT I’ve seen from any airline ever goes to Iberia. I had a bad experience with their IT a few years ago, and today I spent a frustrating hour or so failing to do something super simple. Let me tell you the story.
Being burned by Iberia’s terrible IT system in 2021: Iberia ate my seat selection!
In 2021, I flew Iberia’s A350 business class from Madrid to London, which I redeemed Cathay Pacific Asia Miles for. Frustratingly, Iberia didn’t let me select my seat on their own booking system, though I managed to circumvent this by selecting my seat on Malaysia Airlines’ website using the same PNR (due to various Oneworld airlines sharing a GDS). Despite being able to check in to the seat I’d assigned myself, I was bumped to a “honeymoon” seat in Iberia’s staggered configuration next to a stranger…because my original seat had been double booked!
This was so annoying, though not too big of a deal for a 2h 30m flight. I mentioned the frustrating IT system in my review, though otherwise let it go.
Not the window seat I’d assigned myself (and definitely not my preference)
I figured a few years later there’d be a bit of an update to their IT system. I was wrong…
What I tried to do on Iberia’s website today
I’ve got an upcoming trip booked from London to Madrid via Alicante, and I’d originally booked using 22,500 AAdvantage miles and £74.68 (HK$776) in taxes – I could’ve flown direct to Madrid, though I needed to fly out on a specific Sunday afternoon, and none of the afternoon flights that day had award space (easyJet, the cheapest paid option, was charging £97).
I held the itinerary on AAdvantage as it allowed for free mileage redeposits, though I figured the taxes and surcharges were a bit hefty for a one-way itinerary. I also didn’t really want to spend my AAdvantage miles, given that I’d bought them during a fare sale a few years ago (I have a good number of AmEx Membership Rewards points, though AAdvantage isn’t an AmEx UK transfer partner). I also booked business class so I could do a lounge review in London I haven’t tackled before (I wouldn’t generally recommend using your hard-earned miles for intra-Europe busines class), though didn’t need business class particularly from Alicante to Madrid.
None of the other points programmes were showing this exact routing, and I’d searched up that with Avios the total amount spent is the net distance flown, as opposed to the point-to-point distance (so I didn’t bother calling the call center). I managed to find award space on the London to Alicante segment for 20,000 British Airways Avios and £12.50 in taxes, and saw that the Alicante to Madrid flight was going in economy for just 1,400 Iberia Avios plus £19.10 in taxes. Sweet!
I had zero Avios in my Iberia account, though you can transfer Avios freely through the “ecosystem”, so this was an easily solvable problem. Or so I thought. What ensued was the most frustrating time trying to transfer 1,400 Avios from my British Airways account to my Iberia account, which made me lose patience and book another similarly timed flight from Alicante to Madrid outright instead.
(In case you were wondering, the same flight cost 3,500 Avios + £14 if booking via British Airways – the different Avios “flavours” charge different rates for the same flight.)
Trying to link my British Airways and Iberia accounts
Step one was to link my British Airways and Iberia accounts. I’m still in the process of moving my frequent flyer accounts over to another email (from my personal Gmail), so my accounts for the two different airlines were on different emails. For this reason, I wasn’t able to link the accounts. Okay, fair enough.
Iberia didn’t let me change my email address – I kept getting a “Access email” error when I tried to do so. Thankfully, British Airways did allow me to change my email almost instantaneously, despite saying that it’d require 72 hours to do so. So I changed the email addresses to match, and successfully linked the accounts together.
Thankfully this step was resolved quite quickly, and I moved onto trying to transfer my British Airways Avios into my Iberia account.
Trying to transfer my British Airways Avios to my Iberia account
The Avios website natively allows you to transfer Avios from one account to another, and the actual interface is easy enough to use. Below is a screenshot of what the interface looks like after you set it up properly.
Looks easy, right? Well, you can’t transfer points to your Iberia account unless your account is over 90 days old, and you’ve earned at least one Avios natively within the account!
While annoying, this still wasn’t a blocker for me, as I’d held an Iberia account for more than 90 days – I decided to transfer a few points over from my AmEx Membership Rewards balance into my Iberia account, given that Iberia is a Membership Rewards transfer partner in the UK.
Failing to transfer my AmEx Membership Rewards points to Iberia
I went to the AmEx Membership Rewards transfer portal to try and transfer my Membership Rewards points to my Iberia Club account. This required adding my eight-digit account number into the system, then transferring a minimum of 1000 points at a 1:1 ratio. The catch? My Iberia account number was nine digits, so AmEx wasn’t able to process the transfer.
Turns out that Iberia started issuing 9-digit account numbers in 2022 (bearing in mind that’s three years ago), though they’d hard-coded eight digit account numbers with all of their partners. This meant that since 2022, new Iberia Club users all over the world have been struggling to use their account to transfer between partners. I know that transfers from AmEx MR to Iberia worked for a time in early 2024, though it’s been down for over a year.
Adding 4-5 zeros before the number as per Reddit didn’t help either, and AmEx even had a warning that said that “points transfers to Iberia Club are currently unavailable, please refer to our Travel Transfer Partners page to transfer Membership Reward points to Avios via other airlines”. Great, that’s the entire reason I’m here!
Earning Iberia Avios…with a survey?
So I couldn’t transfer Avios into my account, and I needed at least 1 Avios in my Iberia account in order to link it to the Avios ecosystem. Great, this wasn’t going well for me. I also couldn’t use Iberia’s shopping portal, since many products only shipped to Spain (not to mention that I wasn’t really looking to buy anything at the moment).
Thankfully, there is a way to earn Iberia Avios – by completing a community survey. Avios for Thoughts is a scheme where you can complete free online community surveys, and earn Avios when you complete each survey. Iberia hosts Avios for Thoughts, so I connected my Iberia membership number to the Avios for Thoughts scheme.
Of course, the 5-minute welcome tutorial just led me to an error page.
However, I was then redirected to this page, where I could choose between a plethora of community surveys to do, ranging from travel and tourism, to food and beverage, to employment. Mind you, any of the surveys timed under 10 minutes just led to another error page.
So I powered through. I answered about 20 minutes’ worth of survey questions about UK F&B outlets. To be fair, that was a study I’d be keen to see the results of, though I wasn’t necessarily dying to take a survey at that moment. It was just question after question after question of rankings, rating sliders, and opinion polls, and I couldn’t speed through it either (there were questions to “catch” bots trying to gas through the survey in order to earn Avios).
I’m one of the fastest laptop users I know, and it still took me a good 20 minutes to finish that survey (to be fair, I might’ve missed the 10-minute food and beverage survey above, which did work when I was trying to load it up for this post).
Not the survey I did, but you get the flavour
After finishing the survey, I earned not just 80 Avios for finishing the survey, but also a further 500 Avios’ worth of “welcome bonus” on top of that – score! I was only 820 Avios away (and £19) from being able to book this 1h 10m Iberia economy flight, after around 45 minutes’ worth of hassle.
Yet another hurdle…
That would’ve been too easy – Iberia’s site was now down, and I couldn’t even load up the flights that I’d seen earlier.
Not only that, but British Airways wasn’t even allowing me to transfer Avios to Iberia Club anymore, saying that it had “detected unusual activity on my account” (apparently this takes weeks to fix, and I don’t even want to get started).
This made me think of the “rake” meme template, which I’ve never related to as much in my life – in fact, I think it’s extremely fitting to this situation.
Around this point I started looking around for cash fares, and found a £28 (HK$291) cash fare on Air Europa on a 737 one-way from Alicante to Madrid. This would allow me to try Air Europa for the first time, and I could also bring my carry-on onboard for that price, which I’d be able to store in the overhead bin (Iberia was operating this flight with a CRJ1000, so I’d have to gate check my bag). Given that I was just paying £9 (HK$94) more, at this point I just cut my losses and booked my ticket on Air Europa, given that they’d be a new airline for me.
Airlines need to do better when it comes to IT
Airlines charge substantial amounts of money to their passengers. Obviously in this case it was borderline funny, since we were talking about 1,400 Avios when the opportunity cost was a £28 flight. However, I can’t imagine I’d be as good-humoured about the situation if I was struggling to book a longhaul business class flight from Madrid to the U.S..
Commercial aviation is a complex industry, and it blows my mind why full-service airlines can’t invest more in their IT, especially in Europe. British Airways themselves don’t have great IT (though they feel like a FAANG company compared to Iberia), I already called out Air France/KLM earlier, and the Lufthansa group don’t have an impressive interface either, despite having probably the best of the three large airline groups. Ryanair and easyJet blow them out of the water from an IT perspective, given that they invest in reducing friction when charging for ancillaries.
This is something that the U.S. airlines do really well. Although I paid higher taxes and fees with American Airlines, it was very easy to cancel my ticket, and my miles, taxes and fees were almost immediately reimbursed to my account. I’ve used United and Delta’s booking systems as well in recent past, and feel like they’re quite well-designed and easy to use as well.
Conclusion
I wasted over an hour trying to transfer miles to my Iberia Avios account, so I could book a ticket using 1,400 miles in economy for a 1h 10m flight. After wrestling with the system and completing a 25-minute survey that had nothing to do with aviation just to earn 80 Avios (plus a 500 Avios bonus for doing it for the first time), the booking system generated an error, where I gave up, crowned Iberia’s IT the worst in the industry, and decided to carry my business elsewhere.
What’s your most frustrating aviation IT story?