American Express is removing Priority Pass lounge card restaurant access

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• BJ says:

  8 Jul8 July 07:38

  OT: BA YQ will probably be increasing! The data debacle…
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48905907

• Mikeact says:

  8 Jul8 July 07:42

  Why the page format change today ? My two devices are both showing the same going into the on version to see the comments. All the categories, recommendations etc shown on the right hand side which are not normally visible.

  • Rhys says:

    8 Jul8 July 07:43

    That shouldn’t be happening! If you could take a moment to screenshot it and email it to me that would be helpful – rhys [at] headforpoints.co.uk

  • Rob says:

    8 Jul8 July 08:29

    Odd. Seems fine on iPad.

• Miles. On point. says:

  8 Jul8 July 07:56

  Very much looking forward to the party this evening. Rather hoping there might be some prizes of Marriott Elite status or perhaps an enhanced status challenge for those attending. With all those airlines attending I shall be keeping my fingers crossed for some flight giveaways too

  • Rob says:

    8 Jul8 July 08:27

    No flights. We don’t do a big raffle at the Summer party – we save that for Christmas. Will be 2-3 Bonvoy items rather than 30 as at Christmas.

    • Alex says:

      8 Jul8 July 11:06

      A stay at the Renaissance is always nice, especially before that 5:40 Eurostar… 🙂

• Tom1 says:

  8 Jul8 July 07:57

  O/t anyone at Wimbledon today? See you in the Amex area if you are (assuming I make it in the ground before I need to leave to get to the party!)

  • Alex Sm says:

    8 Jul8 July 08:01

    Was there on Sat! But wasn’t able to spend 120 to get 20 back

    • Barry says:

      8 Jul8 July 08:42

      Was also there on Saturday! Joined the queue at 6.20am, got in just before midday. Quicker than previous middle Saturdays!

      Managed to hit the £120 spend target but didn’t get an email when the Amex guy swiped my card to enroll me. Will be into customer services if the credit didn’t hit… was the only reason why I bought a £35 towel!!

      • Chelseafi says:

        8 Jul8 July 09:53

        Was also there Saturday, managed to get Cenre Court seats in ballot, had great day, popped into lounge around 4.00, thought it was nice and just a few people in queue which moved quickly. Enjoy today

  • BS says:

    8 Jul8 July 09:38

    I’m there tomorrow. Got tickets via the amex priority. First time I’ve ever got tickets except by queueing despite faffing around with the ballot etc. (despite them being row ZZ etc…)
    I think this is what I’ll do next year, worked very well!

    • Tom1 says:

      8 Jul8 July 10:33

      I tried the amex ones but failed, did you just go to the Ticketmaster site 2 days prior?

      So I resorted to a morning in the queue hopefully for a ground pass

      • BS says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:40

        I got mine at around 12:08 ish. The tickets actually became available at 11:58 ish which I missed. It holds the tickets for about 10 mins if you don’t pay. So I got tickets on the ‘second pass’ as it were as someone didn’t pay in time or didn’t want them. If I were doing it again I would click refresh repeatedly from 11:55 to pick up when the tickets become available.

        • Tom1 says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:05

          Ok thanks BS.
          I had it open in a couple of windows, waiting naively for the timer countdown.
          Then I just tried it a minute or so before 12 and noticed it went straight in, but was ready too late. Will know for next year, thanks!

      • BS says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:46

        Yes.
        You notice a timer on future days counting down to midday. This is not correct – it opens up about 90s before the timer finishes. Therefore click refresh repeatedly just before midday to give you first pass access to the tickets.

      • Shoestring says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:50

        61 mins to go!

      • BS says:

        8 Jul8 July 12:04

        Any luck?
        I got No 1 court tickets (not via Amex route)

• Chrisasaurus says:

  8 Jul8 July 08:02

  Have a good time tonight folks.

  In case anyone knows the answer to my OT:
  Any ideas on how to prevent Enterprise Plus points expiring, other than a needless rental?

• n_g says:

  8 Jul8 July 08:49

  They are really testing me when it comes to justifying this increased fee. Looks like they’ve removed the Sydney restaurants but luckily I’m flying there before Aug 1st. Restaurant in Sao Paulo looks to be gone too which I was planning on using later in the year.

  • Anna says:

    8 Jul8 July 09:30

    I’m certainly not missing any of the benefits, could never get in the lounge at MAN anyway! Got travel insurance through work and HH gold via Barclaycard spend, don’t think it’s going to be too much hardship waiting 24 months – if there’s still a sign up bonus by then! We’re keeping one BAPP and one SPG in the household for referrals and points collecting in the meantime.

    • Liz says:

      8 Jul8 July 09:54

      We managed to use the restaurant allowance twice in Brisbane last year $36 x 4 people twice so got our monies worth there. I recently cancelled my Plat card also, probably for the last time. I’ve switched to the free blue card to hold my small stash of MR pts for now. I also have the BAPP and SPG for now and will keep them till i can refer hubby for SPG, Gold CC and BAPP in Jan 2021 – unless things change before then – which I suspect they will! Will just use the BA lounges for our CW main USA trips and have taken out the Barclays travel pack which will give us 6 passes for anything else we do in the year. Just need to buy some car hire excess insurance. Also now using the Hilton CC again to retain Gold status.

      • Polly says:

        8 Jul8 July 11:42

        A lot of people going that route and Anna’s too. Finishing off our plats soon. But we do have the HSBC Elite mc plus 1 card which does give us unlimited PP entry, if we get in, that is. Grain store in LGW is brilliant. Several uses on one visit. Earns the fee back no problem. Have noticed sometimes the lounge will accept lounge key but not PP, which is odd. We will also buy annual car excess policy. Travel Insurance by our bank til 80. Doing all our referrals and stick with a blue and an SPG. Maybe the odd green plat if we have a big spend to use for the upgrade conversion spend.

      • Anna says:

        8 Jul8 July 13:31

        I bought my car hire excess policy (which will do us for this summer and next Easter) through Shoestring’s pet site for about £40 and got £16 which I then converted to avios with last week’s 25% bonus offer.

        That posted quite quickly, but my £100 for a life insurance policy is saying it will take 36 weeks to track – is this correct?!!

        • Liz says:

          8 Jul8 July 15:43

          @Anna – which company did you go with. I will wait till next year before we go to the USA again as we won’t be hiring anything before then.

        • Polly says:

          8 Jul8 July 17:27

          Anna
          I tried to convert mine Sat for the 25% uplift but could find nowhere to insert my baec no. 1st time trying so failed miserably. Asked for a call back..but just can’t seem to get the hang of that website. Must try harder! We use lcancarinsurance, think it’s called.

        • Liz says:

          8 Jul8 July 17:51

          @Polly – you need to go in to My Profile, then Payout Details on the right hand side,

  • Louie says:

    8 Jul8 July 10:01

    Amex Australia are removing the restaurant benefit from Oz cardholders from 1 August too.

    • Rob says:

      8 Jul8 July 10:16

      As is Hong Kong, Germany / Austria and presumably other places where I haven’t seen it reported.

      • UK_Shhip says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:30

        hasnt been removed in Singapore (Yet) – but the fee here is a hefty SGD$1712 (about 1K GBP) so maybe we will get to keep it….

    • n_g says:

      8 Jul8 July 11:21

      Had heard other countries were removing the benefit but I assumed given the recent sizeable increase in cost for the card in UK that they wouldn’t do so here. Looks like in order to minimise the blow of removing a benefit so soon after the increase is to keep the Gatwick option available which from what I hear is essential for anyone who flies through Gatwick as PP holders constantly get turned away from the lounge.

      The only recent good news is that I’m getting decent value from the Addison Lee credit at the moment. Would still have preferred if it was Uber.

• Philip White says:

  8 Jul8 July 09:00

  I stayed in the RC Budapest when it was a Le Meriden… Fantastic hotel, in a great location in a wonderful city.
  Not jealous at all for the lucky winner, honest!

• Oli says:

  8 Jul8 July 09:31

  Alex Cruz in response to the proposed £183m fine: “We are surprised and disappointed in this initial finding from the ICO. British Airways responded quickly to a criminal act to steal customers’ data. We have found no evidence of fraud/fraudulent activity on accounts linked to the theft.”

  No evidence of fraud… What an absolute joke. He deserves the fine for that statement alone.

  • ChrisC says:

    8 Jul8 July 09:44

    I hope the ICO picks up on those statements and adds to the fine. Such denials do not go down well with regulators.

    • The Original David says:

      8 Jul8 July 10:26

      He’s either an idiot or has been badly advised. GDPR is quite clear that the fine is for losing data, there’s no dependency on fraud being committed.

  • Craig says:

    8 Jul8 July 09:54

    Fraudulent transaction on my BA Amex, small transaction as a test. Cancelled and replaced the card even though BA and Amex said I didn’t need to. It’s difficult to prove it’s related to the breach but there is a definitive pattern.

    • meta says:

      8 Jul8 July 09:59

      Quite the opposite for me. Full transaction straight away (at 1am on New Year’s). Amex said it was due to BA breach and replaced the card and changed the number straight away.

    • Czechoslovakia says:

      8 Jul8 July 13:37

      Had 2 fraudulent transactions on my BA card, PayPal and Asda, which Amex sorted pronto and sent me a new card. 2 weeks later, a few smaller charges trickled through on the old card number. Apparently there are 2 levels of blocking, and AMEX didn’t fully block it “in my interest”! Suggest always asking for the card to be fully blocked.

  • Doug M says:

    8 Jul8 July 10:13

    The man spouts blatant lies and doesn’t understand why the fine is so serious, maybe 183 million reason to think again were needed. Having said that I don’t think AC is responsible for the data breach, that lies elsewhere in IAG.

  • SimonW says:

    8 Jul8 July 10:24

    This fine will eventually be paid for by the customers – ie. all of us…..

    • Roger* says:

      8 Jul8 July 10:28

      Simon Calder, quoted on LBC/Global News, calculates this as £4 per passenger.

      • SimonW says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:49

        Or, over £350 for each of the 500,000 cardholders/customers that were affected.

    • Rob says:

      8 Jul8 July 10:49

      It won’t. Airline pricing operates in a mysterious world with no link to costs at all, as anyone who works in revenue management will tell you. All pricing is done on the back of what others are charging and what has already been sold.

      • SimonW says:

        8 Jul8 July 10:57

        Ok, semantics. Ticket prices may not change, but somewhere a cost saving will be found to pay for this fine. Be it quality of food, or linen, or something else during a BA journey.

        • Shoestring says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:17

          yep I think the fine is far too high, completely out of proportion to the GDPR offence – and much higher than previous, worse but similar, GDPR offences

          cf Cambridge Analytica/ FB – £500K

          Denham – person running ICO – must be a BA-hater

          plus there’s a class action running against BA that will surely punish them pretty badly in itself
          https://www.dataleaklawyers.co.uk/british-airways-data-breach-compensation-action

        • Sam says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:24

          @shoestring

          It’s 1.5% of global revenue vs maximum fine of 4%. Facebook/Cambridge Analytica was fined the maximum allowed at the time following the previous law. Had it been the same law being applied to BA, the fine would have been much larger.

        • Shoestring says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:29

          yep but 1.5% of T/O is far too high for the size of the GDPR offence

          ICO is clearly trying to make a huge point with BA the scapegoat in the sense that the point is making ‘somebody’ pay through the nose to get wider publicity

          think about the level of damage/ inconvenience actually done/ caused – it’s pretty minor

        • Rob says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:42

          The ‘behind the scenes’ inconvenience is huge, far more than most people understand, because BA had to disable a lot of systems which feed data out of the BA infrastructure. It has caused us substantial issues although we have been compensated.

          Cruz should understand this fine. There is an old mantra in aviation which goes ‘if you think safety / maintenance is expensive, wait until you see the cost of saving money’. This is what is now being applied to data protection.

        • Andy says:

          8 Jul8 July 11:47

          @Shoestring

          We can only sign up to one class action suit though? Hadn’t heard of DataLeakLawyers. I signed up to the SPG Law one.

        • Sam says:

          8 Jul8 July 12:32

          I also think that this is related to how poorly BA managed the situation. Unofficially, word is that BA were fully aware of their vulnerabilities but because of cost cutting were hugely negligent and careless which would have lead to a bigger fine. BA’s mantra still seems to be no harm, no foul despite lots of people (including Amex) stating that fraudulent purchases were made directly off the back of the breach.

        • AndyGWP says:

          8 Jul8 July 13:36

          Agreed. If ICO can see (for want of better words), “best endeavours” both pre and post incident, they’ll be more accommodating

          If they see people’s data not looked after and a presence of negligence or miscommunication post-incident, then they will handle it accordingly as per their guidance

        • Rob says:

          8 Jul8 July 14:35

          For a data breach that went on for THREE AND A HALF MONTHS I am not convinced …

        • AndyGWP says:

          8 Jul8 July 15:47

          That’s what I mean by pre-incident Rob. If you have shoddy standards and controls in place, then you are not being responsible with data. This is fundamental to GDPR.

          The length that this breach took place, alongside how it occurred in the first place are pre-incident negligence too.

          In short, the protect / detect / respond attributes of cyber assurance taken by BA were shoddy across the board and the ICO could have been more lenient if that wasn’t the case.

  • KevMc says:

    8 Jul8 July 11:27

    How can he say they responded quickly? They were stealing the data for months!

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