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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.

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Category

British Airways American Express

Comments (360)

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

  • Jimmy says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:16

    With seat availability I wasn’t getting much use from the card before. Whisky only a smallish increase I will be cancelling the card at renewal. Virgin looks far more attractive

  • BuilBackBetter says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:17

    Is the signup bonus worth the extra fee?

    • BuilBackBetter says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:18

      It is. Better to wait to be eligible for sing up bonus

  • Chas says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:20

    I’m heaving a small sigh of relief, having read the article on the free card first, and fearing that the “economy only” redemption would be mirrored on this card too.

    It seems to me that BA are trying to more clearly differentiate between two customer segments; 1) the mass market customer who doesn’t properly understand the value of Avios, and how “free flights” aren’t really free once the taxes and surcharges are taken into consideration, and from whom BA can milk them like a cash cow given the extra availability; and 2) the knowledgeable lot whom frequent HfP who will more than likely such up the fee increase so long as it still works for them.

    • CarpalTravel says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:22

      No way they are doing that. This card and basically the whole Avios programme would be dead to me if they limited the class use.

      • Chas says:
        1 Jun1 June 10:38

        Yes, it would be dead to most of us if they made it economy only the BAPP. But that is essentially what they are doing with the free card most of the users of which probably just see “free flights”.

        • CarpalTravel says:
          1 Jun1 June 10:59

          Very true, however speaking very selfishly, I see that as less competition for the seats I go for! Though their augmenting the availability last week kind of did that already.

    • BuilBackBetter says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:23

      Was worried they might pull the plug on the card! This change means it won’t be pulled for atleast another 2 years

      • meta says:
        1 Jun1 June 10:52

        They can still pull it for new customers and keep the existing ones only.

        • Memesweeper says:
          1 Jun1 June 11:56

          Amex bought a lot of Avios off BA in advance recently. I’m sure this, along with today’s changes, will ensure these cards live on for new applications for years to come.

          • meta says:
            1 Jun1 June 13:50

            But if it hits their bottom line, they can easily give away huge sign up bonuses in US, shower us with spend x, get 20k avio, etc. Nothing is permanent ever. Changes used to happen every 4-5 years. I think changes will now be in 2-3 year cycles.

  • Ed says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:23

    Alongside the increased number of CW redemption seats available and the economy only 241 on blue card, could end up in a situation with much more opportunities to use the 241

    • Dominic says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:27

      That’s a good point; fewer Blue cards may help reduce some demand on the more coveted seats…

      • FatherOfFour says:
        1 Jun1 June 15:07

        Availability changes = More competition, since families are now “in the game” for redemption seats. BA Blue changes = less competition for premium seats. Maybe it ends up as status quo?

  • Lou says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:24

    I mainly got the premium card for the avios to nectar earning. The increase in fee means it’s no longer worth it for that purpose. Ah well

  • EvilGazebo says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:24

    Unpopular opinion probably but removing the ex-uk restriction is very valuable to some (me). I have a pool of miles split between BA and VS but I don’t earn much anymore outside cc spend. The family are (understandably) obsessed with The Clubhouse at LHR having made the mistake of being able to take them there a couple of times.

    Now I can use VS cc vouchers for the outbound and 241s for the inbound. And using both airlines often helps trying to get reward availability in school holidays. But BA out VS home was always the wrong way round imo. Just a shame it’s not retrospective for my existing 241s

  • Andrew says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:25

    The card number moving to the back of the card means it’s presumably going to be metal? Guess that’s worth the extra £55!

    • Youllnever says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:32

      Or they could just have a similar design to the VA cards which are plastic.

    • J says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:32

      I can’t wait for this metal fad to end, wallet weight is getting ridiculous.

      • CarpalTravel says:
        1 Jun1 June 11:02

        Whilst I do like the novelty and prestige, you are correct. Just between the Curve and Amex Plat my wallet is already considerably heavier, and thicker.

    • Ziggy says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:34

      Not necessarily. There are a number of credit cards in the US that are made from plastic and that have a cardholder’s details on the back. The BA card from Chase being just one example.

      • James says:
        1 Jun1 June 11:55

        And Virgin Money credit and debit in the UK, and Curve, and Halifax (currently rolled out to credit cards), and new design Santander zero… you don’t need metal cards to put the number on the back.

    • Matt says:
      1 Jun1 June 10:35

      No. The Virgin cards are plastic but have all name/ number on the back.

  • Michael says:
    1 Jun1 June 10:26

    Re not having to start in the UK anymore: Would this mean that you could use the voucher to book something like HKG-LHR (stopover) – JFK and return JFK – LHR (stopover) – HKG and avoid the hefty surcharges ?
    Basically you could make two holidays out of it.

    • meta says:
      1 Jun1 June 13:56

      You can do that now even and this changes nothing unless the surcharges come down. But there are rules on distance. Basically the middle leg (the one you would fly on separate ticket) must not be greater in distance than the either of the two.

      • Michael says:
        1 Jun1 June 14:51

        in the above example, the tickets starts in HKG though. So shouldn’t the whole ticket receive the lower charges ?

        • pauldb says:
          1 Jun1 June 16:45

          HKG no longer bans YQ, BA and others though just don’t charge them on ex-HKG on HKGLHR legs. But even your ex-HKG ticket would attract YQ on the JFK legs: pricing it up that’s £265 so little or no different to normal.

          But I do believe your elongated return is a valid routing (there’s no sepearte ticket and no open-jaw to be calculated) so yes, potentially two trips out of one voucher if they are going to fence this somehow.

          • Alex W says:
            1 Jun1 June 22:12

            YQ to JFK is £400 so a saving of £270 on a 241, plus the Avios you would save by getting your 2 trips out of 1 voucher.

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

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