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BAD NEWS (2): Your BA Premium Plus Amex fee is going up – but more Club seats opened

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American Express has announced some substantial changes today to the two British Airways credit cards.

The biggest changes are to the free British Airways American Express card which I cover here. This card has lost much of its value with the ‘2-4-1’ companion voucher being reduced to ‘Economy only’ flights. The only upside is that the qualifying spend is reduced from £20,000 to £12,000 per year.

This article covers changes to the Premium Plus card. Our full review of the British Airways Premium Plus American Express credit card is here. You can apply here (and beat the fee increase, if you apply before 1st September).

You can see full details of the changes on ba.com here.

What is changing with the British Airways Premium Plus American Express card?

Not a huge amount, but the change is still painful.

The annual fee is going up on 1st September from £195 to £250 per year.

The increase will take effect from your next anniversary date after 1st September. You will receive a letter confirming the changes in the next week or so.

Am I getting any new benefits from my extra £55?

There are some positive changes to the 2-4-1 companion voucher from 1st September.

Premium Plus cardholders get access to additional award availability. This is in addition to the new minimum number of seats guaranteed by BA, although it will vary by route and demand. British Airways will open up ‘I Class’ discounted Club World tickets for voucher redemptions (new vouchers from 1st September only) which should increase availability considerably off peak.

You will also be able to use it for flights which do not depart from the UK. This won’t benefit many people, however, and it doesn’t apply retrospectively to companion vouchers which have already been issued.

The two ways in which this might be useful are:

  • for one-way flights back to the UK, when you are travelling outwards on another airline or on a BA cash ticket
  • if you want to save Air Passenger Duty by booking, say, Dublin to Heathrow to Dubai – but the extra Avios need for Dublin to Heathrow, plus the cost of getting to Dublin in the first place, would eat up much of the saving

In a cosmetic change, the card is getting a new design which I haven’t seen. The card number will be moved to the back of the card.

What can you do if you don’t want to pay £250 per year?

British Airways and American Express are hoping that the additional Avios availability announced last week, plus access to I-class seating, will make people willing to pay the higher fee.

The snag, of course, is that it will take a while for value of additional availability to become clear, whilst the £250 will be very obvious from the start.

There isn’t even any additional Avios availability, if you are being pedantic, until British Airways returns to at least 50% of the schedule it was running in January 2019. At the moment it is offering double the number of Avios seats but on fewer than 50% of the usual number of services.

Your options would include:

Conclusion

My gut feeling is that most people will suck up the £250 fee for the British Airways Premium Plus card. There was lots of grumbling in this HfP article from 2016 when the fee rose from £150 to £195 but how many people actually went through with their threat to cancel?

The benefits are still very powerful if you can use the 2-4-1 voucher for a premium cabin redemption, and in theory there should eventually be more Avios seats available under the new arrangements. Letting you redeem new vouchers earned from September for I-class Club World seats will also help.

I am more interested to see how holders of the free British Airways American Express card react now that their companion voucher can only be used in Economy. How many will cancel and how many will decide to pay £250 per year to upgrade? It would be interesting to know what percentage of 2-4-1 vouchers issued on the free card are redeemed in premium cabins.

Amex needs to be careful because I think it is now vulnerable to attack. There are, I believe, around 500,000 holders of BA Amex cards and they are an attractive market, spending over £1 billion per month AFAIK. They are relatively easy to target via HfP and other travel media.

JP Morgan Chase is reportedly planning premium UK credit cards. It has hired 400 people in the UK to launch a Marcus-style retail bank under the Chase brand and is proving a strong competitor to Amex in the US. Who knows what mileage products may emerge from Chase or other players?

Given that American Express recently bailed out British Airways by pre-paying for £750 million-worth of Avios, it is clearly assuming that you stick around.

If you decide not to stick around, we will cover some of the alternatives in the weeks to come.

You can find out more on this special page of ba.com.


Want to earn more points from credit cards? – April 2024 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current 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

You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

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

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

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

18,000 bonus points and 1.5 points for every £1 you spend Read our full review

Earning miles and points from small business cards

If you are a sole trader or run a small company, you may also want to check out these offers:

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

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

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

For a non-American Express option, we also recommend the Barclaycard Select Cashback card for sole traders and small businesses. It is FREE and you receive 1% cashback on your spending.

Barclaycard Select Cashback Business Credit Card

1% cashback uncapped* on all your business spending (T&C apply) Read our full review

Comments (363)

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

  • N says:

    Gah.

    • John Gartside says:

      I will cancel. Live near Manchester and fly to Boston 2x a year. Hassle as means routing through Heathrow. Hopefully virgin Aer Lingus will introduce a more direct flight. So will switch to one of their cards if appropriate. Suspect there maybe more cancellations from north west customers as BA ignores us anyway.

  • Jordan D says:

    Well, this definitely wasn’t the good news we were looking for.

    • Yorkieflyer says:

      I said it would be bad news, no hyperbole from Rob yesterday 🧐

  • Optimus Prime says:

    “New Amex offers” someone was saying on another thread 🤣

  • Aaron says:

    Great.

  • Mark says:

    Another “enhancement”

    Get less but pay more.
    Lovely.

  • joseph jordan says:

    brilliant news, as most of my flying originates in dub. might think of taking this card out now :). wonder if i take it out before the fee increase, but generate the required spend after 1st sept, will I get best of both worlds ?

  • Dominic says:

    Basic question, but are existing companion vouchers valid even if you cancel your card?

    Will be looking to downgrade my father, as he won’t spend enough to justify the £250 fee to make use of a second companion voucher (after spending all his avios on a flight soon!).

    Hopefully we see some more competition in this space to at least force Amex to make the card offering more compelling..

    • Paul Pogba says:

      I believe they are but you need to retain an Amex card to pay the charges and taxes but it could be a free card (ARCC, BA Blue).

  • The Streets says:

    Amazing news regarding the change for one-way flights back to the UK. I regularly fly to Hong Kong so this will increase our options for the return flight

    • Memesweeper says:

      +1

      Nice bit of extra flex. My two years without a BA card is up this month and I’ll probably apply in July.

      I guess the best tactic to minimise costs is apply before Sept, and earn the companion voucher afterwards.

    • meta says:

      Well this changes nothing much really, just simplifies the process. I have been doing open-jaw 241s for years now.

      • The Streets says:

        I am probably in a minority but we never know when we are coming back – so I tend to book for going out and then when we’re ready to come back book separately

    • pauldb says:

      Presumably, if it works with your flying habits, you could now book HKG-LHR-HKG and benefit from £0 YQ on both flights

      • pauldb says:

        HKG-LHR // DUB-LHR-HKG £91 fees. 2005 throwback! 🙂

      • meta says:

        Hmm. We don’t know if BA will add surcharges on the LHR-HKG leg which they would be within their right to do. I’ve been doing mix and match with 241s for a while now.

        • pauldb says:

          The point is the whole ticket is ex-HKG. You can go online now and book HKG-LHR-HKG return with no YQ. If they change that it would be a change for all their ex-HKG bookings.

          • meta says:

            They can easily make it that. Actually now I remembered that there is no longer any law in Hong Kong banning surcharges. Indeed Cathay Pacific does have surcharges, BA can easily start implementing it from September.

      • BuilBackBetter says:

        You mean nesting of flights? Interesting

        • meta says:

          Yes.

          • Polly says:

            Definite nesting op here..use a 241 ex EU ow to hkg beg feb, then start our return out bound flight from hkg at the end of Feb. Plan to return beginning of the following Nov from the U.K..very well worth a fee increase of £50..repeat starting from HKG again…. lots to think about there…

          • pauldb says:

            But they haven’t make a change (obviously) to their ex-HKG policy just the catch the small number of HKG-LHR redeemers and so they aren’t going to make a change because of an even smaller number of extra HKG-LHR-HKG redeemers.

          • pauldb says:

            Sorry that was meant to be a reply about YQ.

            Back in line, this wouldn’t be nesting. You’d be using the tickets in normal order: single A-east, B-west, B-east, C-west, C-east,… (You may on may not use the inbound of A, but it won’t be at the end of the pattern and it won’t be on a HKG trip)

            Nesting is when you insert a rotation within a rotation: A-east, B-west, B-east, A-west.

      • The Streets says:

        Very interesting thought

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

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