The Rant. The Avios Points Odyssey: Traveling Through the Administrative Nightmare of Iberia, British Airways, and Qatar Airways

There comes a time in every traveler's life when you think, "Booking a last-minute flight to the Maldives can't be that complicated" and the possibility of booking it practically free using loyalty program points, setting your sights on an exclusive destination at an affordable price, is extremely tempting. It's a naive thought, a blatant hubris deserving of divine punishment. In my case, the punishment was Iberia.

The plan was simple, almost elegant in its geometric perfection: book a low-cost flight to Istanbul, so as not to waste frequent flyer miles, using them only on the leg where they were truly needed, then use my Membership Rewards stash for the longer leg on Qatar Airways, converting them through the refined dance of loyalty programs. First on Iberia, then on British Airways, finally on Qatar. Why this process? Because the Avios program ecosystem isn't a system: it's an initiatory sect. Iberia doesn't speak to Qatar. Qatar doesn't speak to Iberia. Both speak to British, but British sighs and looks at you like a 1953 Latin professor who's just discovered you can't conjugate amo, amas, amat . And so it goes through British.

I check everything four times. Five. Ten. The route is perfect, the tickets are available. It's a one-way trip: once Amex points are converted into miles, they can't be reversed, so before converting them, you need to be sure you're converting them where they can actually be used immediately. I check everything again, everything checks out. Good: I click. The points arrive on Iberia.

It's time to transfer to British Airways, as mentioned, a necessary step before I can then transfer them to Qatar Airways. I prepare myself psychologically. And then, like a minor god of confusion launching a bureaucratic thunderbolt, the error appears: "The information doesn't match". What could that be? On British Airways, my name is—appropriately— Introvert Traveler . First name: Introvert. Last name: Traveler. No wonder.

In Iberia, however, for reasons known only to the most obscure Templar orders in Spanish documentation, my name is rightly Introvert , but my surname is Traveler Traveler : a double surname, as Iberian tradition dictates. They have a double surname and, in a civilizing impulse worthy of the empire of Charles V, intend to impose it on the rest of humanity. If someone doesn't have one, they foist one on them.

And you are silent, you mononomic plebeian.

What are the only things I CANNOT change on my Iberia profile? Precisely those: my first and last name. Naturally.

Act I: The Labyrinth

I decide to call the call center. A polite voice reassures me: “No problem, Señor Traveler Traveler. We'll solve it right away. Just fill out an online form, it's easy to find. ”

The form isn't easy to find. It's hidden in a digital cave where no human has ever entered. A place where GDPR is lamenting and interfaces are dying. I find it after forty minutes. I fill it out.

A day passes. A formal and courteous response arrives, worthy of the Habsburg Empire:

“We will respond promptly, no later than a month.”

A month?? In 2025. I've had shorter marriages. To correct a text string . One almost expects a wax seal, a white-gloved master of ceremonies, a "His Excellency the Clerk of Surnames will be able to receive you no later than the full moon".

Act II: The Kafkaesque Spiral

After a few hours, I receive another email:

“If you have changed your surname due to marriage or gender reassignment, you must reply to this email attaching your new passport.” (Unfortunately, the email comes from noreply@iberia.com )

What part of "noreply" is obscure? None. Yet I'm being asked to "reply." It's as if they were telling me, "Open the bricked-up door to your left. The handle is imaginary". I reply, however, to the noreply address; after all, it doesn't cost anything; it could be a trap, a diversion; perhaps the account is called that not because it isn't intended for user replies, but simply to inform those who write to it that they will inevitably receive no response.

I reopen a ticket. Same response. Same automatic response. Same fate: ticket closed automatically.

Meanwhile, there are ten days left until departure. I've already booked my hotel and diving trips; I can't risk being left behind. My Qatar ticket, available when I started this whole process, could evaporate at any moment. My points—the fruit of hard work, accumulation, and strategy—are held captive by Madrid's inquisitors. Surrounded. Defenseless. Awaiting a ransom no one knows how to pay.

Act III: The Paradox That Repeats Itself

In a panic, I write to frequent flyer Facebook groups. I find a man in the same situation. But he's Spanish. He has two surnames. But Iberia has given him four surnames: a sort of mythical replication of identity, an exponentially iterative hallucination, like in an Escher painting. He's spoken to the Spanish call center, the police, the bishop of his city. Nothing. He's been living in limbo for weeks.

I'm starting to think the Iberia system isn't flawed . It's a mistake. A conceptual work. A permanent performance. An installation by Cristian Boltanski on modern bureaucracy.

I'm starting to think that perhaps the simplest solution is actually to change my sex. If the mountain doesn't come to Muhammad, Muhammad will go to the mountain. In a world plunged into woke delirium, a sex change might even open the door to unexplored privileges.

Act IV: The Epiphany — she appears

Just as I'm about to give up, she appears. Perhaps the Goddess Athena. Perhaps the Lady of the Lake delivering Excalibur. Perhaps a digital nymph generated by a benevolent algorithm, an angelic epiphany.

Her name is Martina.

Martina isn't real. She can't be. She's too efficient, too empathetic, too quick. She responds pertinently, immediately understands the problem, doesn't cite protocols, doesn't recite scripts written in 1987. She acts. She proposes. She verifies. She takes an interest. She seeks solutions .

In a dystopian world of no-reply messages , full mailboxes, uncorrectable formats, absurd requests, and culturally imposed duplicate surnames, Martina's mere existence is already a crack in the wall of the absurd, a glitch in the matrix. A light filtering into a room designed to be dark.

I don't know if she'll be able to solve the problem. I don't know if I'll be able to redeem my Avios. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get to the Maldives without first getting a degree in Iberian Administrative Anthropology.

All I know is this: in a universe governed by bureaucratic nonsense, Martina's existence is already enough to restore dignity to hope, it is an outstretched hand that pierces the surface while you are drowning in the abyss of the surreal.

ACT V - You cannot imagine Sisyphus happy

All it takes is two phone calls to Martina, and the next morning, suddenly, completely unexpectedly, a ping crosses the digital highways that lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean, and at 9:57 a.m., my email says, "We're letting you know your personal information has been updated". I gasp in disbelief, thinking the nightmare is over, like John Cusack in room 1408, and I rush to the Avios website for the penultimate step, from Iberia to British Airways. Then, I think, it'll be a breeze: British Airways, an institution, Qatar Airways, one of the most prestigious airlines. What could possibly go wrong at this point? And indeed, everything seems to be going smoothly: I connect the two airline accounts in a few seconds, transfer the points, go to the Qatar website, and book the tickets using my miles. Green light. All set. We're up and running, I have the booking code. Maldives, here I come, and more importantly, I'm coming for free!

I go to sleep, devoting my last thoughts to the magnificent and progressive fortunes of loyalty programs. The next morning, when I wake up, I lounge in bed, browsing social media, and I stumble upon an article about booking economy class flights. I wonder what class my next flight will be in. I open the Qatar Airways app and am plunged back into a hallucination. My reservation is gone, lost, vanished. I call the Qatar Airways call center, which, after a few quick checks, informs me that there was a problem transferring my Avios points from British Airways to Qatar and that, in my best interest, I'd better quickly rebook another flight, because time is running out and I don't want to be stranded. In the meantime, the Qatar Airways representative smoothly informs me, the flights bookable with Avios points are sold out and I'll have to pay. I try to express my grievances: I already had a validly booked ticket, whose cancellation I discovered purely by chance; a points transfer issue between airlines needs to be resolved between them, not by canceling my legitimately purchased ticket. The smooth-talking Qatari man suggests I contact the British airline, because they're now blocked.

I don't want to dwell on this story any further, which ended with me sadly paying for a long, multi-stop flight with various low-cost airlines, just to stay within a budget that had been created with the assumption of free flights. If I had to summarize the reaction of British Airways’ customer service in a concise, striking meme—even if somewhat rough around the edges—I think it could be effectively represented like this.:

So, for all the call centers in the world, for all the bureaucrats, for all the airline managers who earn five-figure salaries while taking care not to fix the problems for which they are responsible, for all the creators of illusory marketing campaigns, for all those at the top of organizations characterized by labyrinthine procedures and inefficient systems, I leave it to the divine Hieronymus Bosch to conceive a suitable torment: swallowed by a giant bird while flames, black smoke, and swallows belch from its ass, for eternity.