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British Airways Executive Club ‘unavailable’ for three days in November

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You may already have received the email that BA Executive Club will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance and improvements to the underlying tech.

All British Airways customers are being emailed today to warn of a scheduled outage of ALL Executive Club functions for a 3.5 day period, between 3pm on the 13th and midnight on the 16th of November, so that you can plan ahead.

British Airways Executive Club status cards

What will happen?

ALL Executive Club functionality will be unavailable during the scheduled improvements. That means you WON’T be able to:

  • Check your Avios balance or transactions
  • Redeem your Avios for flights or any other redemptions
  • Combine your Avios
  • Transfer Avios to another member
  • Claim missing Avios
  • Change or update your Executive Club personal information including email address, address, password etc
  • Manage your Household Account, Family & Friends or travel companions list

The engineering work does NOT affect flights and you will still be able to add your BA Executive Club number to any flights you take. You can still check in and use Manage My Booking as normal.

It only affects British Airways Executive Club – Iberia Plus, AerClub and Avios.com accounts will remain unaffected.

Will Avios transactions still post?

Yes. Any Avios transactions during the downtime (which could include Avios being deposited in your account from flights taken, or from Amex, or other partners) will credit once the scheduled work has completed.

They may take a little longer to appear whilst BA works through all Avios earned globally during the period.

Why is the outage happening?

Whilst not confirmed, this is likely to be related to the ‘Global Loyalty Platform’ project which has been ongoing at IAG for several years.

The platform would form a global hub for all Avios programs rather than having them managed separately by British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus etc, in a similar structure to how milesandmore.com is the single hub for all Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian, LOT and Brussels Airlines mileage activity.

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Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (81)

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

  • Andrew says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:25

    Spans 5 days not 3.

  • Andrew says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:27

    And you can’t shop and collect Avios through the e store at this time either (as you need to log-in to do so).

  • E14 says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:33

    Yeah, I know now when all my bookings will reappear

  • ChrisW says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:38

    Now you would think BA would increase call centre staff during this period to deal with the increased call volumes from members calling to do things they can’t do online.

    You would think …

    • BJ says:
      29 Oct29 October 19:05

      They probably wouldn’t have access either.

    • Rhys says:
      29 Oct29 October 19:35

      Nobody has access. The entire system is changing. You won’t be able to redeem Avios online or via phone.

      • Nick says:
        29 Oct29 October 22:55

        And ChrisW where exactly do you think they’d get the staff from anyway? It takes months to train BA call centre staff. Is it worth that for just 3-4 days?

  • FatherOfFour says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:38

    I am also going to guess that I can’t book a flight using an FTV that contains Avios and a companion voucher! In theory, no Avios should need to leave my account as they are all wrapped up in the FTV – however, I’m guessing it would still need to be accessed / linked from my account in some way.

  • Andrew says:
    29 Oct29 October 18:46

    I wonder if this will affect lounge access for status economy passengers if Exec Club is down and they can’t verify your status – screen grab your card now just in case!

  • Lady London says:
    29 Oct29 October 20:55

    Oh dear.
    Are they combining the programs with a view to:-
    (1) better mine and/or sell the dats
    (2) value and separate the program from the businesses eventually.

    I wonder which professional IT or consultancy companies are involved in this IT work, and which country it’s being executed in.

    • BJ says:
      29 Oct29 October 21:19

      The cheapest one I guess

    • Rhys says:
      29 Oct29 October 21:36

      We don’t know what they’re doing but I’m not sure they’re combining the programs.

      The problem for a long time has been that eg. combine my Avios is very flakey. Integrating what is in effect 3+ different systems must be really annoying. It may be that they are just migrating to a single technical solution that will still be plugged into Iberia, BA, Aer Lingus separately, so you might not see a difference but it will be much easier for IAG to manage.

      But the short answer is that we simply don’t know!

  • SteveJ says:
    29 Oct29 October 20:57

    This is unacceptable. We must raise a class action against BA for this. I’ll be raising an MCOL for the distress caused. The Ministry of Transport and MI5 are aware of this issue.

    • Andrew says:
      29 Oct29 October 21:03

      It’s a shame BA isn’t a public body or you could put in a FOI request!

      • Matarredondaaa says:
        30 Oct30 October 11:12

        And have it rejected as this Government only accepting, based on latest information I saw 42% of requests compared to the average of 60%!

    • Jeff Greene says:
      30 Oct30 October 04:21

      I’m surprised someone hasn’t complained about it impacting their mental health

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

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