New British Airways benefit – transfer Avios for free, but with catches

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Russell Evans says:

  15 Apr15 April 07:07

  I “accidentally” setup a household account recently and when asking them if I could break it up in a more efficient manner than posting the form they said I could scan & e-mail to customeraccounts@avios.com. Beware if you have a household account on Avios.com the ability to combine avios into and out of your avios.com account is blocked

• James67 says:

  15 Apr15 April 07:12

  Yes, I think you got the point Rob. And ltobably also another sweetener abead of a big devaluation I believe is round the corner. I think they are just biding theur time on outcome of YQ lawsuits.

• Phillip says:

  15 Apr15 April 07:20

  I can’t help but feel that BA have been failing Gold members for a while now while enhancing the lower tiers with many more attractive benefits. This is not a complaint, by any means, but it just seems that BA does not seem to know what their top tier, high paying customers (be it through business or personal spend) want.

  • Lady London says:

    18 Apr18 April 14:42

    If you think of GGL as the new Gold, it makes sense.
    Golds don’t matter anymore.

    • Rob says:

      18 Apr18 April 17:31

      That is a failed strategy though. Let’s assume that the figure of 10,000 GGL’s is correct. I would estimate that under 500 actually achieve it purely through personal spending. The other 9,500 work for companies who make them fly BA because of route deals or annual rebates. These people are not ‘loyal’ to BA in any sense so it makes no sense to reward their loyalty disproportionately.

      Further down the pecking order, there are a heck of a lot of Golds (me for a number of years) who achieve it entirely or substantially via personal spend. This is money that can very easily drift away from BA.

      The point of a GOOD loyalty scheme is that it encourages additional MARGINAL spend from ALL customers. You don’t see Tesco focussing on their top 10,000 spenders with Clubcard and telling everyone else to take a jump. Every member is encouraged, via vouchers or whatever, to spend just a little bit more than they usually do, which is why it works.

• Alan says:

  15 Apr15 April 07:48

  What a totally pointless benefit! No idea why they’ve introduced this, it certainly does nothing to offset the recent change!

• avidsaver says:

  15 Apr15 April 08:15

  Don’t you have to wait 6 months before you can make a change/break up an Avios.com household account?

  • Rob says:

    15 Apr15 April 11:32

    No, there is no time limit in the T&C’s AFAIK. I did this back in 2012 and certainly didn’t wait 6 months. I also wouldn’t try to do it after 2 weeks, though ….

• Maximum Power says:

  15 Apr15 April 08:16

  How about this?

  I don’t have a BA account I only have an Avios account with 80,000 miles mostly picked up from hotels and bonus incentives.

  I set up an account for my mum on avois – and hoover up all the bonues in her name so where i can get 1,000 points for something do the same for her and once I have built up avois in her name, comebine the accounts and take all her points that I couldnt have earned myself as I would have already done so?

  Basically maximising all the point freebies around x 2??

  • TimS says:

    15 Apr15 April 09:14

    Yes, that is possible.
    I know it works as I have already opened such an account my daughter!

  • Trevor says:

    15 Apr15 April 09:22

    Just don’t combine the accounts, as you don’t earn benefits per member, only per account and a household account is seen as 1 account. Better to create similar BAEC accounts and transfer the Avios there where you can have a household account and use all Avios.

  • Rob says:

    15 Apr15 April 11:33

    Yes, that would work fine. Form a household account in avois.com and then split it, allocating 100% of the Avios to yourself.

• Trevor says:

  15 Apr15 April 10:04

  This benefit seems pretty pointless! If you can buy a full price avios redemption for others anyway, what is the point of being able to transfer only a little over half the points required for a long haul? Clearly of little use to gold members, and even less to blue/bronze. Having relaxed their rules, I see no downside of a household account or adding friends, making this move of no benefit.

  With regards to transfer via an avios.com account, there are at least 4 potential downsides:
  1) When you create an avios household account, you lose the ability to earn bonuses per person – they can only be earned once per account.
  2) When you add/remove someone from a household account, you are supposed to wait 6 months before making further changes – not sure how strictly this is enforced.
  3) When you create/break a household account, they have effectively created new accounts, so your account history is wiped. What this means is that until you earn avios via whatever means, your account is INACTIVE, so you can’t get RFS prices or benefit from bonuses that require an active account. Earning points via the eshop or whatever can take 35 days+ to post, so you will experience “downtime” on each account.
  4) You are unable to move avios using “Combine My Avios” when you have an avios household account.

  Since I see little point in moving the avios from one account to another when the BAEC household account works just as well, and due to the above downsides, I’d say while possible, it’s not really worth the time and effort to move avios via avios.com.

• Georgie says:

  15 Apr15 April 10:33

  I just closed our AVIOS family account and moved it into my name only as I am the only one who puts miles in anyway, and wanted the option of using Combine My Avios to transfer miles in from BAEC, didn’t realise I wouldn’t be able to use it immediately for reward fund savers.

  I did notice that my account history had been completely wiped and assume (although I haven’t checked) that I now have a new account number.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.