Avios are the points currency for British Airways Frequent Flyer Program, Executive Club. Iberia also uses Avios, but strangely, while the currency is the same, the programs have some different rules. Points transfer freely between Iberia and BA Avios accounts. I don’t use either currency frequently, but there are some sweet spots. The main benefit to Iberia Avios is that there are no fuel surcharges on Iberia awards, which are a huge savings compared to the exorbitant fees often charged for awards on BA metal using Avios. Rocky covered the basics of Iberia Avios in an earlier post.
I opened an Iberia Avios account some time ago to give me some options for awards. I don’t have many points in the account, but I do have occasional transactions to keep it active. Recently, I have had difficulties in getting logged in to my account. This process took close to a month to resolve. Something as simple as checking my account balance should be simple, and not need any hands on assistance. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. I can’t promise it won’t be painful for others in a similar situation, but hopefully sharing my experiences will help you avoid some of the hassles I encountered.
Communicating with Iberia about My Avios Account
Most of my communication was over email. Most messages I sent took 3-4 days to get a reply. That is painfully slow, but what is worse is how much back and forth I went through to make any sort of resolution. For some reason my password/PIN stopped working. The functionality for password reset did not work for me, so I had to go through a complicated process to get a temporary PIN assigned. Somewhere along the way, I used a form for unlocking my account, which required a lot of personal information, including a scan of my passport page. Yikes. Thankfully that seemed to do the trick, and I was able to get a new PIN.
Even though I received a temporary PIN, for the first few days, it didn’t work. I reached back out to Iberia, and then before I heard back, but after I sent the email, this original temporary PIN worked. Unfortunately, my PIN was reset again, so I had to go through this entire process again.
Other Annoyances with Iberia Online
Every time I visit the Iberia website, it is a multiple step process. In my attempts to get to the Iberia homepage, there is an “Expired Session” message. Annoying:
How Did I Finally Get Access to My Iberia Avios Account?
After much time, and countless emails back and forth, I have finally reached a solution. Here are the instructions that worked for me:
I’m not the most tech savvy person, but normally I can resolve issues like this on my own. The logic built into the Iberia website doesn’t sync up with my logic. Following the above instructions exactly seemed to finally solve this issue for me. And thankfully, I again have access to my Iberia Avios account.
