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Bits: BBC on non-vanishing fuel surcharges, Club World pax to Vancouver can sit in First

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News in brief:

The BBC covers the mystery of the non-vanishing fuel surcharge

The BBC website moved into interesting frequent flyer territory last week, taking a look at why fuel surcharges still appear to exist – especially with British Airways.

It also ponders why, following a legal challenge in the US, they are now called ‘carrier imposed surcharges’ over there.

It is well worth having a read – click here for the full piece.

Be prepared to roll your eyes as a Lufthansa spokesman claims the charge is now for “costs beyond our control such as air traffic control fees, emissions trading scheme payments and so on.”  Obviously.

British Airways

No British Airways First Class on Vancouver until March

Due to aircraft changes, British Airways will not be offering First Class on Vancouver services from Thursday until the end of February.

The aircraft, a Boeing 747, will have a First Class cabin but it is one of the few which has not been refurbished as the plane was due to be retired.  The aircraft will fly with the First Class cabin closed or, if demand is high, open the cabin but operate a Club World service.

If you are booked on one of these services with Avios, you will receive a partial refund based on the cost of a Club World redemption.

If you are booked to Vancouver in Club World before the end of February, keep an eye on the seat map.  If BA opens up the First Class cabin, you will able to move your seat reservation.

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 12th May 2024, the Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa card is offering a bonus of 30,000 points, convertible into 30,000 Avios. You must have a Limited Company to apply. Click here to learn more and click here to apply.

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You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (92)

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

  • Hingeless says:
    18 Jan18 January 05:07

    Qantas also offer F seats on 747s to business passangers, I flew Sydney to Haneda a few weeks ago in 1k. As the service and food is better thsn BA I actually felt like I was in First.

    They also keep the cabin available regardless of booking levels.

  • rob says:
    18 Jan18 January 05:40

    It doesn’t matter what charges the airlines impose, and what they want to call them or what excuses they want to make for charging them, in a competitive market, even for redemption when we have to pay these charges, we should only compare the final price and if it’s worth it for that product, so i’m not sure why all the fuss with some airlines wanting to charge more.

    • Hingeless says:
      18 Jan18 January 05:51

      BA is longer competing on product, it is competing on price these days ( if you ignore redemption surcharges).

    • Callum says:
      18 Jan18 January 05:58

      Because people think it’s not competitive enough.

      If, for example, Virgin Atlantic had no carrier surcharges on redemptions then maybe BA would be forced to reduce/remove theirs (not a great comparison due to the very different route networks, but there’s not another BA style UK-based airline to compare with!).

  • Cheshire Pete says:
    18 Jan18 January 06:20

    BA is also now still one of the few to impose a “Credit Card” surcharge of a flat £5 no matter the spend, including £35 flights. Including its own BA branded Amex card, which is utterly disgraceful. That represents as a % on a £35 fare a fee of around 15%, Completey against all government guidance on capping such fees to no more than 2.5%. On that basis the flat fee doesn’t even become technically legal until you spend £200 per passenger.

    It’s hard to understand how they get away with it. I am aware of the country work around by the way, but none the less Im sure many of the general public are not.

    • Will says:
      18 Jan18 January 06:33

      I think the surcharge is now actually £10 including using PayPal. It might be that it’s early but I swear when booking a flight on tHursday I was whacked with a £10 surcharge which is quite frankly disgusting.

      • Will says:
        18 Jan18 January 06:35

        Edit having looking it’s a £5 surcharge per person. Still disgusting.

        • Worzel says:
          18 Jan18 January 07:28

          Cheshire Pete:

          Good point about the BA £5 flat fee.

          Booked 8 days car hire via BA Executive Club last week-charged £5 for using their(BAPP) credit card!

          • Worzel says:
            18 Jan18 January 07:35

            To add, the spend was <£200.

          • Brian says:
            18 Jan18 January 07:39

            Worzel, why do you bother using a credit card in such cases? Surely not for the miles, which are clearly not worth spending £5 on. Do you get other advantages that make it worth using a CC?

          • Worzel says:
            18 Jan18 January 07:51

            Good point Brian- Not for the miles as we’ve more than we can use.

            I prefer to have section 75 available if necessary.

            Hacked Off with the £5 BAPP charge I still went for it, as there is the “advertised” added extra driver for free.

      • harry says:
        18 Jan18 January 07:52

        Strangely enough, a lot of HFP readers live in Uzbekistan

    • James says:
      18 Jan18 January 06:56

      You don’t pay the surcharge on RFS bookings but you do on revenue flights and other products, based on my experience last week of booking 3xCE RFS returns (£150) and a £108 car hire (£113).

    • Mark B says:
      18 Jan18 January 07:47

      What is the country work around then, pretending to be a non UK resident?

      • Rob says:
        18 Jan18 January 08:14

        Obviously you shouldn’t be actively avoiding it. However, when selecting a country in the dropdown menu, sometimes your mouse just slips and accidentally clicks the one next to United Kingdom.

    • Rob says:
      18 Jan18 January 08:13

      Be careful what you with for – Virgin is 1.5% flat which can easily exceed the BA figure.

      And the BA credit card fee can be avoided very easily, I assume 80% of the HFP readership know how.

      • YHM says:
        18 Jan18 January 08:17

        Do you have a post up on this? Not sure how to do it.

        • John says:
          18 Jan18 January 09:54

          Not sure it would be wise for Raffles to openly advertise this in post which goes out by to BA, Amex and Avios (though he’s already mentioned it in the comments)

    • Phillip says:
      18 Jan18 January 08:33

      Got charged £10 for >£600 spend.

    • TheFamousJames says:
      18 Jan18 January 09:50

      Glad somebody brought up the BA credit card surcharge. That’s why I visited to comment this morning. Does anybody know if this continuing practice IS actually illegal in the face of the EU rules on capping? Can anybody say class action? Maybe that’s a PPI-style reclaim activity I could get behind…

      • John says:
        18 Jan18 January 10:07

        The EU capping rules are for fees between banks, so no.

        IANAL but “class action” doesn’t exist in the UK does it?

        What might be illegal under EU law is that cardholders from other EU countries do not have to pay this charge.

        • TheFamousJames says:
          18 Jan18 January 10:15

          My tongue was firmly in my cheek on that post. Shame there’s no emoji for that! The principle stands though – it still seems excessive. Someone posted that 80% of HFP readers will know how to avoid the fee. If that is something other than using a debit card, then I must be in the 20% that don’t know the trick?

          • Rob says:
            18 Jan18 January 10:43

            Is now explained in the other comments – which I will delete at the end of the day.

        • Rob says:
          18 Jan18 January 10:47

          What you need to remember is that the law was changed a few years ago to ALLOW credit card fees. This was after pressure from consumer groups.

          They believed that, if Tesco charged a card fee in-store, it would be able to reduce the cost of shopping for cash customers. And cash customers are effectively poorer.

          You use an Amex in Tesco, Tesco pays, say, 1% to Amex to fund your Avios. Nice. The low income person behind you who can’t get a credit card pays more for their shopping because Tesco has to recover your 1%. That was the logic.

          In reality, very few shops decided to add a fee but some groups, like airlines, jumped on it.

          Virgin charges 1.5% FLAT. This, arguably, is a truer reflection of their real cost. However, when you asked for a £100 credit card on a £6,500 business class purchase it does grate, clearly.

      • Lady London says:
        18 Jan18 January 11:14

        waaah hey can you imagine if BA’s credit card surcharges to consumers that are so far beyond any conceivable cost to process them, were challenged in a court of law and the judgement said that BA must repay all such illegally collected credit card charges? 🙂

    • Pierre says:
      18 Jan18 January 11:02

      Is this definitely the case? I booked redemption flights on the BA website 4 days ago, paid with the BA Premium Plus Amex, and was only charged the £35 per ticket. No credit card surcharge…

  • Jazzysarah says:
    18 Jan18 January 06:44

    Avios uk don’t charge for cc

  • Smid says:
    18 Jan18 January 07:09

    They have flown new first on that route, we were on it last April. However, we had lucked out, because we grabbed the reward seats shortly after the new first was added, giving us plenty of choices of seats, vs virtually none from any other west coast departure.

    • Rob says:
      18 Jan18 January 08:15

      Yes they have. BA has aircraft issues after a plane got some damage – I think this 747 was due to have been pensioned off but has been retained as cover.

  • CV3V says:
    18 Jan18 January 08:49

    Had an F seat on a CX flight from KUL to HKG, I had spotted it via Myflights app when the aircraft changed from a 3 class to a 4 class, at the time I had my CX Gold status and was able to reserve 1A. Same business class food and service, but all tasted a little bit nicer in 1A!

  • Phillip says:
    18 Jan18 January 08:52

    I am booked to fly back from Vancouver on 17 Feb. The seat selections for Club are now split in three: Upper Deck, Main Deck and Front Cabin (which is the First Class section). All seats in the Front Cabin are currently blocked. I’m not really sure I’d want to sit there. I think I prefer the Upper Deck in a Club seat.

    • John says:
      18 Jan18 January 10:03

      I think I might never get to fly 747 upper deck.

      By the time I moved up from economy the 747 was no longer widely used. I don’t regularly go to BA’s remaining 747 destinations.

      I did go to YVR last summer and chose an upper deck seat, but I got upgraded to F!

  • nick says:
    18 Jan18 January 09:48

    Completely OT, but are there any quick ways to earn United MileagePlus miles? I could use about 60k in the next month. Alternatively, can I book United flights from any other airline’s loyalty scheme? They seem to have a monopoly on certain (very) short flights on the west coast that I really need to fly, but they are charging a fortune for them ($400 for a one-hour flight!). I’ve checked and they have reward availability at about 10k miles per leg so I’m hoping I can earn about 60k miles quickly to avoid a $2400 cost for 6 short flights, or use some other, more easily accessible airline loyalty scheme to book the flights.

    Thanks!

    • John says:
      18 Jan18 January 09:57

      You can book UA flights with any Star Alliance FFP. It won’t cost 10k miles though (which is the saver price for UAMP only), probably 12500 at the least, maybe 15000 or even 25000. Saver and standard availability are different.

      If you need 60000 miles next month, then you probably need to take a short paid F flight which earns 200% or more

      • nick says:
        18 Jan18 January 10:14

        Thanks, that is really helpful. I’ll take a look. You are right, I’ve been looking at saver availability. At 25k per leg it really is very difficult, but even if I can only do two of the flights on points, it’s a decent cash saving. In terms of flexible “currency”, I’ve got about 40k Amex Member Rewards Points and about 25k SPG points (and precisely 522 MileagePlus miles!).

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