British Airways moves to ‘earn Avios based on your spend’ – are you a winner or a loser?

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• Hilda M says:

  19 Jul19 July 11:10

  No email yet here in Spain. Gold for Life, wondering if it will be 9 per EUR or GBP. Definitely worse off – upcoming MAD LHR SIN netting about 39,400 Avios reduces to 23,760 😩

• Jill Kinkell says:

  19 Jul19 July 11:20

  No more Tesco Avios, reduced Avios from flights unless I fork out a hangar’s worth of cash, and even then ,it’s not clear exactly how many Avios a trip earns, 24 month Amex hiatus and then the ‘which card in which order ‘ Its all becoming so much more of a challenge to navigate . thank God for HfP and it’s posters to keep me right.

  • JDB says:

    19 Jul19 July 11:45

    And you are looking on the bright side, hoping the 24 month Amex gap continues to apply. It has taken Amex seven years since pro-rata refunds ceased in the US to stop them in the UK. I think it’s nine years since the ‘once in a lifetime’ (sometimes believed to be seven years) SUB rule was introduced for personal cards and seven years since it was introduced for business cards.

    • zapato1060 says:

      19 Jul19 July 14:12

      Yeah but at least they have competition from Chase et al.

• Vahan says:

  19 Jul19 July 11:24

  By rewarding the higher spender reimbursed by their employer BA is making the traveller happier, hence rewarding their high spending employer. BA is trying to reward their highest spenders more. This makes a lot of sense to me. For the low spenders BA is competing with the likes of EasyJet in Europe, hence can afford to reward less. Most holiday travellers on the cheapest tickets probably don’t care about collecting miles anyway.

  • Rob says:

    19 Jul19 July 11:43

    So you’re saying that, given a choice of tilting your budget towards:

    * person A, who is made by their employer to fly BA due to a corporate deal or
    * person B, who is a small business with no corporate deal, or a leisure traveller, both of who can fly who they want

    …. that the money should go to person A?

    • Vahan says:

      19 Jul19 July 11:52

      I don’t know the maths behind it and so can’t say what’s the correct answer, but I suspect a large chunk of BA’s revenue comes from corporate deals, so they care more about rewarding those corporations.
      Although it’s not as direct as rewarding the frequent traveller, but rewarding the first case can make good business sense. It doesn’t matter if the person being rewarded has a choice or not – it’s their employer who pays for the trip and hence is rewarded by having happier employees.
      For full discloser, I work for a small business and don’t travel for work.

    • Vahan says:

      19 Jul19 July 11:54

      By sending the money to person A, BA expects person A’s employer to retain/expand their business with BA.

      • Ziggy says:

        20 Jul20 July 01:47

        Why would an employer “expand their business with BA” just because their employee is happy with the airline?

        As long as the carrier is safe and gets the employee to where the business needs the employee to be, all the employer really cares about is cost and the amount of time the employee is out of action (due to being in the air). What the employee thinks about BA and the rewards the airline gives them will have very little impact on the contracts that an employer chooses to sign with an airline.

        • Vahan says:

          20 Jul20 July 18:05

          It’s just another perk, like insurance, free lunch, gym etc. Perks can do magic even for the highest earners. Or perhaps this is to reflect on changing travel trends when revenue is less defined by corporate deals and more by high paying holidaymakers. There is also the changing competition, when cheapest tickets earn nothing to little. I’m just trying to say there are enough reasons for BA to change the avios model.

• Londonsteve says:

  19 Jul19 July 11:46

  This might have interesting consequences vis a vis corporate travel policies because it creates a direct incentive for an employee to choose a more expensive flight. Whereas before it was mileage based and therefore disconnected from the fare, a high fare might tempt a BAEC member into booking it on the company dime induced by the Avios reward. So as to remove perverse incentives to waste corporate cash we might increasingly see the collection of FF miles banned altogether when travelling for work. This in turn might drive business away from BA if employees can no longer accrue Avios or chase status, therefore they’ll go with what they perceive is the best travel experience. The state of BA at the moment suggests it often won’t be BA!

  • GeoffreyB says:

    19 Jul19 July 16:35

    Dunno about other companies but my travel system stops people doing that. If a flight is significantly more expensive than an equivalent one it gets flagged to someone senior if someone still tries to book it and it and won’t get approved.

    • Londonsteve says:

      19 Jul19 July 19:35

      This sounds normal and the practice will work on a route like New York where there’s a vast array of options, but on many routes BA’s competition will be another national carrier, or only low cost airlines. In other cases an employee could vary their travel dates to bring into scope dearer flights because they’ll receive far more Avios that way if there’s a clear justification to fly BA over any other alternative (for example, because the cost of a taxi to Stansted is expensive versus taking the tube to Heathrow, or just the inconvenience over the journey time to the alternative airport). I may well be hallucinating these risks but I can certainly see the well-informed traveller salivating at the prospect of contriving to end up on high priced BA flights. A former colleague recently flew BUD-LHR-BUD in economy and paid 600 Euros for a Sunday-Friday flight at times that were convenient for business travel.

• G says:

  19 Jul19 July 12:09

  Is there any more information, beyond the BA T&Cs as to how to circumvent this?

  I am assuming just booking BA/IB flights but via AA / AY / QR / JL / CX is the way to go for now; and booking AA to fly on AA is completely unaffected?

• SteveCroydon says:

  19 Jul19 July 12:46

  Last year my BA sale First class trip LHR-DFW-DEN-DFW-LHR earned 32,000 Avios for £2,050. Now it will only earn 12,300 (as a blue then, now silver). So much more transparent!!!!
  Also some of HHA members received multiple emails announcing this “improvement” and some of the Avios balances were over a year old and totally wrong. Another excellent piece of BA IT.
  I also wonder what a total dog’s breakfast the IT systems will make of awarding Avios pre/post 18th October, especially when a PNR has been amended due to cancellation, etc.

  • Mike Hunt says:

    19 Jul19 July 13:10

    Ditto – I have received three emails so far about this from BA – all the same email but different executive club numbers and details – not relating to me or any one I know !!!

    • Richie says:

      19 Jul19 July 13:19

      Yes, has happened to me. I think they maybe sending e mails to addresses that relate to former bmi diamond club membership.

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    19 Jul19 July 14:26

    I got the email and the avios and TPs were correct and that even allowed for the fact that I had used some avios in the early hours of yesterday morning!

• Davey11 says:

  19 Jul19 July 14:27

  Big thing I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere – this is going to be a pretty sizeable IT implementation. Chances of it all going right when they go live on BA’s systems? Has their IT ever delivered an upgrade close to this smoothly? “I seem to have earned 2million avios for my flight to Edinburgh”

• E says:

  19 Jul19 July 14:36

  Not great but not unexpected. Most avios earning is not from flying, and I expect BA will seek to make this even more the case with commercial partnerships beyond credit cards. There will be more earnings opportunities rather than less.

  The big fear is a change to the way you spend avios. If that becomes revenue based then that’s the end of it really. I’m sitting on 250k avios and really need to burn through them but avios spending is not the sole driver of where I spend them.

  OT but can I use an cash e-voucher on BA Holidays bookings?

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    19 Jul19 July 15:01

    Yes but you need to call to book, then pay and then they refund the voucher amount back to your card.

  • Londonsteve says:

    19 Jul19 July 15:23

    Thing is, Avios Loyalty cannot limit their clients to earning the bulk of their Avios from credit card spend and sign up bonuses. This heavily restricts the customer base to people that can and want to churn credit cards or are putting a lot of self employed expenses through their personal card. With the recent subscription offer and now boost, it appears they’re increasingly seeking to turn this into a currency you simply buy into as and when for cash, exchanging it for seats as and when they’ll let you. Frankly I prefer that option as I have access to far more Avios than before and I don’t have to cook up complex ways to get hold of them at a decent price (or free) in order to have enough. Redemption tickets are a clever way to get empty seats out the back door without annoying people that paid a lot more booking earlier, or cannibalising a high paying late booking customer (who is usually travelling on business). For this reason I don’t think they’ll make many changes to reward pricing – they need people to smell a bargain and fill empty seats at the last minute as I’d imagine many more redemption seats are ‘sold’ on a given flight by bleeding them into the market gradually, especially close to departure. Clearly that’s not the case for the most popular services on which they’ll release the guaranteed minimum when booking opens and nothing thereafter.

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