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British Airways moves credit card fees to a flat 1% …. as Virgin Atlantic scraps them

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According to reports in Business Traveller, British Airways is changing the way it calculates credit card fees on bookings from 14th December.

The current charge is a flat fee of £5 per booking, with no fee on award bookings or when debit cards are used.  This is obviously unattractive on low value bookings, although in those scenarios you would presumably have no liquidity problem if you used a debit card anyway.

British Airways BA A380 flying

The new structure is a flat percentage rate of 1%.  This is obviously attractive for a £39 one-way economy flight to Manchester, but a nightmare for anyone paying for a number of premium tickets.

Whilst the card fee is capped at £20, this is per ticket and not per booking, so a family of four could still be faced with an £80 bill for four Club World tickets.

It is hard to claim that the new structure is ‘unfair’.  I would only point out you are more likely to put an expensive ticket on a credit card and may not have the option of using a debit card if you do not have the money immediately available.

There does not appear to be any discount for British Airways credit card holders.

It is not clear if the fee will continue to be waived for anyone who states that their credit card is registered outside the UK.

Whilst Virgin Atlantic scraps its card fee …..

It is possible that British Airways chose to do this because Virgin Atlantic has always had a similar – higher, actually, at 1.5% – card pricing structure.

However, with great timing, Virgin Atlantic dropped all credit card fees when it relaunched its website last weekend.

Whether this survives now that British Airways is charging up to £20 per ticket remains to be seen.

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Category

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Comments (115)

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

  • Anon says:
    18 Nov18 November 06:32

    Finally Virgin leading the pack, with this and connecting FlyBE flights, they are working hard to retain customers from migrating to BA (esp from the regions)

  • Sam G says:
    18 Nov18 November 06:40

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the Virgin removal is temporary and related to their system migration (to Delta platform, no CC fees in the US)

    It’s either a nice revenue earner or it pushes people to debit cards which have a far lower cost to the airline

  • Bob says:
    18 Nov18 November 06:50

    Urgh … and a problem with moving people to debit card payments is that Amex travel insurance on the Plat requires that you paid with an Amex…

    • Nick says:
      18 Nov18 November 09:03

      I was told by Amex (Brighton) that as long as you hold an Amex Platinum your’re insured. No need to pay with your a Amex.

      • Rob says:
        18 Nov18 November 09:38

        Not quite that simple. You are covered for big stuff (medical) but not for small stuff (eg £200 back if your plane is 4 hours delayed).

      • the_real_a says:
        18 Nov18 November 09:42

        For medical yes – but not for baggage or disruption coverage. If you rely on Plat Insurance please download and read the booklet very carefully.

  • Gavin says:
    18 Nov18 November 07:00

    OT but BA:

    The sun have the “Effing money” story…

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2201771/greedy-british-airways-bosses-joke-about-crude-slogan-show-me-the-fing-money-as-passengers-face-less-leg-room-and-cramped-seats/

  • Charlie says:
    18 Nov18 November 07:03

    Presumably residents from Ukraine are exempt still?

  • Phil says:
    18 Nov18 November 07:11

    How about BA Hotel bookings with credit cards?

    • Genghis says:
      18 Nov18 November 07:34

      Do BA Hotel bookings offer any value vs Hotels.com with 10% back from rewards and perhaps 7% from cash / points back?

      • AndyR says:
        18 Nov18 November 09:39

        I’ve had a few good deals with BA holidays where the flights + hotel was only £10-£20 more than flights only. For example, I paid £138 per person for 2 nights in Krakow in December and flights on their own were around £125 (HBO). So got 2 nights at the Hilton Garden Inn for £26.

  • Stuart says:
    18 Nov18 November 07:33

    O/t – anyone receiving only one email a day? The other two are definitely not caught in spam filter, they don’t arrive to my mail server at all.

    • the real harry says:
      18 Nov18 November 07:59

      you could set up an alias email ID that goes to the same email address as your main 1, subscribe to HFP again, the unsubscribe on the dodgy main one

    • Rob says:
      18 Nov18 November 08:50

      Only you Stuart! Your ISP is blocking them (stage 1 spam filtering which you cannot control) before they hit your inbox (stage 2 spam filtering).

      • Stuart says:
        18 Nov18 November 10:28

        Slightly worrying since I run my own spam filter. Are your logs showing stage 1 refusal or are you talking generally?

        • Rob says:
          18 Nov18 November 10:52

          I do see the data: you got the 3rd story today but not the top two which had a ‘soft bounce’ back from your ISP. Yesterday the top email and the 3rd email had a ‘soft bounce’ back. The day before you got all three.

          This is how MailChimp defines “soft bounce”:

          Soft bounces typically indicate a temporary delivery issue to an address and are handled differently than hard bounces by MailChimp. When an email address soft bounces, it will immediately display as a soft bounce in the campaign report.

          If an email address continues to soft bounce in additional campaigns, the address will eventually be considered a hard bounce and cleaned from your list. We’ll allow seven soft bounces for an email address with no subscriber activity and up to 15 soft bounces for subscribers with previous subscriber activity before converting a soft bounce into a hard bounce. While there are many reasons an email address may soft bounce, below are some common reasons this could happen.

          Mailbox is full (over quota).
          Recipient email server is down or offline.
          Email message is too large.

  • Barry cutters says:
    18 Nov18 November 08:14

    Here come more boycot Ba comments …..

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

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