Get BA lounge access by matching your non-oneworld Gold card to airberlin

A couple of days, I wrote that the Turkish Airline status match still seems to be active.  If you have a Gold card issued by any other airline, Turkish may be willing to give you one of their Gold cards for free – and that means that you would get 2 years of Gold status, including lounge access, across all 20+ Star Alliance airlines.

Mr Tibbs posted something very interesting in the comments.

He had managed to get airberlin‘s frequent flyer scheme, Top Bonus, to give him 5 months of Gold status as a match to his existing Gold card.

Now, airberlin is – like British Airways – a member of the oneworld alliance.  This means that you can use an airberlin Gold card to get you most of the benefits of a British Airways Silver card, including:

• access to BA lounges when flying on BA or another oneworld airline
• use of business class check in desks
• free seat selection on BA flights

This is no different to the benefits that those people who get the free Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Gold card from American Express Platinum enjoy when flying BA.

If you want to try to match your Star Alliance or Flying Blue status to airberlin Top Bonus, you should open a Top Bonus account and then email service [at] topbonus.de and ask for a match.

You should include as much documentation as you can, including a colour scan of your current card and (if you have flight activity on the card) a copy of your statement.  You may also want to give some reason why you would be flying on airberlin in the future – or perhaps even book a cancellable airberlin ticket! – although this should not be necessary.

Note that there is no point bothering to match an existing Silver card for Top Bonus Silver.  Top Bonus Silver is equivalent to British Airways Executive Club Bronze, and that doesn’t get you anything of value, frankly!

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (June 2021)

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

There are two official British Airways American Express cards:

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

We also recommend Capital On Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card:

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

(Want to earn more Avios?  Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)