My thoughts on Alex Cruz’s thoughts for changes to Avios and British Airways Executive Club

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• Adam says:

  27 Mar27 March 10:16

  Great analysis. Rob – I’ll hire you if you ever need a job 🙂

• Dave says:

  27 Mar27 March 10:36

  Rob this is a great run down and makes sense to the likes of us, especially when you factor in what happened to Necter and the difficulty BA will face with people moving to other airlines to redeem. However, I think you have failed to factor in one serious factor – Alex Cruz. Need I say more? ????

• D. Fuller says:

  27 Mar27 March 10:40

  We have been using BA from Heathrow to Nice two or three times a year for more than 25 years
  We are executive club members and have never gone up from the blue card which gives nothing.
  Why do I bother one might ask Well we can get to the airport on public transport
  And in the interests of economy go for the cheapest price
  Only BA does the sunshine route from Heathrow.
  So anyone with a blue card are not considered at all.

• Thomas Howard says:

  27 Mar27 March 11:02

  OT but are the terms on 241 vouchers regarding the voucher holder being on the flight enforced? I have one and I’m likely emigrating in the next 6 months with no partner and little time so it would be more useful to me being used to fly my mum and partner down to visit or even being sacrificed to my brother and wife for the same. If the booking system allowed me to make the booking is there any risk of it being cancelled closer to the flight date?

  • Anna says:

    27 Mar27 March 11:11

    The booking system automatically puts the voucher holder as one of the passengers, I don’t know of any way to get round this.

  • Daftboy says:

    27 Mar27 March 11:11

    It won’t let you do that – you need to be one of the travelling party.

  • Simon says:

    27 Mar27 March 11:26

    I live in Asia most of the time , to get use out of my remaining 241 i ensure we plan and book the Avios tickets from London , the only issue is availability and the only reason it works for me is due to using the Joker which means its easier to change

    If none GGL i think i would look to use them up ASAP before moving , they wont allow usage unless the account holder is traveling and/or the flight is booked from London

  • Rob says:

    27 Mar27 March 12:04

    Physically not possible to book if you are not on it.

• Simon says:

  27 Mar27 March 11:19

  I have been flying with BA/OW since 2010 , i am about 1500 tier points from LTG , once achieved i will let the GGL slide and carry on with just OWE , BAEC is great with GGL (2 Jokers etc) and to be perfectly honest i burn around 300-350,000 miles per annum, but if the below changes happen , then Star (Krisflyer) , Sky Team and Virgin come much more into play , the only reason i have stuck so long with BAEC is due to GGL, which does offer fantastic benefits

  if i was to start again now i wouldn’t be using BAEC or BA , if flying West it would be Virgin , if east it would be one of several carriers

  How i miss the days of the Diamond Card and the Earn/Burn Rates , that was when this game/hobby was in its prime………. I remember when the Seoul Flight Started and the promo cost was £777 in CW and upgrade to First was 20,000 , sadly those days have long gone

• RussellH says:

  27 Mar27 March 11:28

  Talking of Nectar, I am old enough to remember the days when shopping at Sainsbury’s got you Air Miles (before they became Avios). Back then the nearest Sainsbury’s was in Edinburgh (Cameron Toll) and there were times when we would travel the 40 miles to Cameron Toll for food shopping, just to get some more Air Miles too. No one would have ever done that for Nectar points! For a time I even had three separate Sainsbury’s loyalty cards – for Cameron Toll, for one in west London near other family members and one in Oxfordshire, near some of my partner’s family.
  I remember being told by an instore CS person after Sainsbury’s announced that they were stopping Air Miles that we should not worry as the new loyalty scheme wouls still include travel – which turned out to be paying for EasyJet at the same rate as for Sainsbury’s groceries, but with the disadvantage of a booking fee!
  And sadly, we still run too high a Nectar balance.

  • Lumma says:

    27 Mar27 March 11:58

    To be fair, the booking fee on easyJet redemptions with nectar didn’t make the flights more expensive than booking for cash on the easyJet website. It just priced the flights up cheaper then added the fee to make them the same price.

    • Save East Coast Rewards says:

      27 Mar27 March 12:03

      So just like redeeming on VTEC it offers no benefit. It’s easier to redeem in Sainsbury’s so buy your weekly shop on points and then use the money saved to pay for a flight.

      I’ve never tried to redeem on EZY (no longer possible) but the procedure on VTEC is a hassle so unless there’s a promotion there’s no value gained in doing so.

      Anyway summer rewards is round the corner and cheap pizzas is the most exciting Nectar gets.

      • Lumma says:

        27 Mar27 March 12:19

        Strange thing with myself was that most of my easyJet flights over the last couple of years I used nectar points to reduce the cost. I know easyJet seem to get a lot of love from people on this site but I never find them to be fantastic value. Ryanair are often considerably cheaper when they compete on a route and there’s often not a huge difference between their fares and BA’s. And with BA I’m going to have most of what easyJet change for for free as a silver card holder

      • Stu N says:

        27 Mar27 March 12:30

        We just wait until we have £25-30 of Nectarr points then buy a nice bottle of gin. Very sad we don’t have a convenient Tesco as that would massively boost the Avios collection opportunities for us.

      • xcalx says:

        27 Mar27 March 18:11

        OT @ saveeastcoastrewards
        You seem to be the train guy here so was looking for some advice if possible.

        I was booked on the grand central 1604 Kings Cross Bradford service yesterday which was cancelled I was put on the 1606 Virgin service and told to change at Doncaster to catch the connecting 1738 train to Mirfield , arrived in Doncaster at 1743 and due to strikes no more trains were running to Mirfield Had to get a train to Wakefield then taxi home. Arrived home 1hour 35 mins late and cost me a uber. Any recourse.

        Thanks

      • RussellH says:

        27 Mar27 March 22:00

        I assume that Grand Central are required to have some sort of delay compensation scheme, but as they are an open access operator, not a francise, I would not be altogether surprised if the rules were different (= in their favour).
        I would check around on their website and see what you can find.

  • Save East Coast Rewards says:

    27 Mar27 March 11:58

    I never paid much attention to Airmiles back then so by the time I realised they ceased being a partner. There was a big gap though between Sainsbury’s dropping Airmiles and Nectar partnering with easyJet (no longer an option) so for a long time I held onto my high Nectar balance in the hope that they may partner with bmi. I had lost hope when they ended up partnering with EZY.

    I had a high Nectar balance because Sainsbury’s was my local supermarket and until I had something better to collect points on I had a Sainsbury’s credit card (back when it was still Sainsbury’s Reward Card). Although with Nectar all the interesting redemption options disappeared I kept with it until I started flying. From that point on I paid much more attention to loyalty schemes.

    It was much more fun trying to maximise frequent flyer points and well before ahead for Points and before I had heard of frequent flyer forums I thought I was being quiet innovative in in planning my trips to maximise the points earned for the lowest cost but then it turned out many others did the same.

  • Fenny says:

    27 Mar27 March 19:44

    Oh, happy days! Back then, my nearest supermarket was a Sainsburys and I collected Air Miles with them for years. I even had a Sainsburys credit card that I used instead of my corporate Amex for expenses, because nobody accepted corporate Amex back then. I got a cheque a couple of days after I put my expense claim in and that went into my Sainsburys savings account to get huge (by today’s standards) amounts of interest before I paid the bill the following month.

• Cate ⛱️ says:

  27 Mar27 March 12:29

  Excellent in depth review Rob, pleasure to read.

  Reading through it again it may be that BA point collectors have over the years tended to view BA points as a loyalty scheme aimed at the UK market for the UK consumer with the UK market having the biggest market share. This is hardly surprising given how much marketing we’ve grown up with encouraging that view. But is this base rate on the verge of change i wonder?

  The original article written and published for the Chinese market. Presumably the questions which were omitted from the publication had the Chinese consumer in mind. If so they could be interpreted as:

  “South China Morning Post: I understand the IAG board approved changes to Avios, what do those changes look like for [Chinese] BAEC members?

  South China Morning Post: Can you reassure [Chinese] BA frequent flyers that thresholds won’t change? Or revenue-based mindset won’t be introduced?

  My understanding is that Amex is currently applying for licencing in China which, if granted, BA cards could then be available to Chinese customers – affluent Chinese customers with a love affair of all things British but capped on foreign spending. If so your comment highlighted above is really pertinent:

  ‘The point of ANY loyalty scheme should be to encourage INCREMENTAL business. It is NOT about over-rewarding those who spend the most and ignoring the rest.’

  • the_real_a says:

    27 Mar27 March 13:22

    Isn’t the morning star the English language version (if its the one im thinking about). Its catchment would be very different, ex-pats and outward looking business people.

    • ChampagneSocialist says:

      27 Mar27 March 14:21

      The South China Morning Post is a Hong Kong based English newspaper, catering to the English-speaking audience in Hong Kong (so yes, expats as well as presumably locals who use English professionally). Entirely different laws and rules regarding the press, aviation, and finance (credit cards and the like) from mainland China. (And yes, there is a BA Amex in Hong Kong and Hongkongers have no cap on foreign spending.)

      • Leo says:

        27 Mar27 March 21:43

        And the Morning Star is something completely different!

      • the_real_a says:

        28 Mar28 March 16:45

        haha an unfortunate slip on my part!

• Nick says:

  27 Mar27 March 13:06

  Great article Rob! I’d forgotten about the virgin changes, and I do need a new credit card. Hmm…

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