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BIG NEWS: BA Amex annual fee AND voucher qualifying spend to rise sharply

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

The fee for the Premium Plus card will increase to £300. This is effective immediately for new applications.

The annual spend required to receive a 2-4-1 companion voucher will increase to £15,000 in November. This applies to both cards.

BA Amex fee AND voucher qualifying spend to rise sharply

The British Airways Premium Plus fee will rise to £300

This is the easiest change to get your head around.

The fee for the Premium Plus card will increase from the current £250 per year to £300 per year.

The fee increase will apply:

  • from today, if you are a new applicant for the card
  • for your next renewal after 1st August, if you already have the card

This means that if your renewal date is in April, May, June or July, your card will renew at the current £250. You will not pay the higher fee until your subsequent renewal in 2025.

If your next renewal date is after 1st August 2024, you will pay £300 from your next renewal.

The 2-4-1 companion voucher will require £15,000 of spending

This change is more complex because it is NOT linked to your current card year.

From 1st November, you will need to spend £15,000 to receive a 2-4-1 companion voucher. This applies to BOTH the free British Airways American Express card and the Premium Plus version.

The change will kick in on 1st November for both new and existing cardholders.

This means that you are now under pressure to hit your current membership year spend target by 31st October. If you don’t, you’ll need to spend £15,000 instead.

Here’s an example. Let’s assume that you have the Premium Plus card and that your card year runs to 1st February. You will need to either:

  • spend £10,000 by 31 October 2024, or
  • spend £15,000 by 31 January 2025

…. to earn your next voucher. From 1st February 2025, when your membership year renews, you will need to spend £15,000.

BA Amex fee AND voucher qualifying spend to rise sharply

As a reminder, this is how the companion vouchers currently work:

  • the free British Airways American Express card awards a 2-4-1 companion voucher when you spend £12,000 in your membership year. The voucher is valid for one year for an Economy flight redemption on British Airways, Aer Lingus or Iberia.

What do we think?

The increase in the annual fee is not easy to justify. American Express is pointing to improvements in card benefits (the ability for a solo traveller to use it for a 50% Avios discount, the ability to use it on Aer Lingus and Iberia) but for 90% of cardholders these changes have no impact.

(The solo traveller benefit IS valuable, but by default most existing cardholders applied when the voucher was only usable by two people and don’t need this functionality. The ‘value’ in the solo traveller discount is all for the benefit of Amex, since solo travellers are now applying for the card when they wouldn’t previously.)

It will be interesting to see how many people decide that the maths no longer stacks up.

I am more amenable to the increase in annual spend. The card is now over 20 years old and the spend target for the Premium Plus voucher was £10,000 from the start. £10,000 in 2004 is equivalent to over £17,000 in 2024, so it is hard to argue with £15,000.

What should you do if you can’t spend £15,000 per year?

We’ll look at this in a separate article later in the week.

Fundamentally:

  • there is little value in having the free British Airways American Express card if you can’t spend £15,000 per year on it – it makes more sense to have the free American Express Rewards credit card or the free Barclaycard Avios Mastercard
  • there is absolutely no value in having the Premium Plus card (beyond the first year and the big sign-up bonus) if you can’t spend £15,000 to earn the voucher. This isn’t up for discussion.

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Category

British Airways American Express, British Airways and Avios

Comments (623)

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

  • Matarredonda says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:16

    All part of the effects of massive inflation.
    Yesterday the hotels.com rewards were ‘gutted’ to use Rob’s word.
    Wonder if Barclaycard will be following?
    Benefits through card spending declining all the time.

    • Rob says:
      10 Apr10 April 10:31

      Hotels.com changes have nothing to do with inflation.

      Hotel schemes with a reward chart (really just Hyatt these days) MUST devalue because inflation means you earn more points per stay and so the reward chart needs to ‘give’. If you’re running a rebate scheme – which is what Hotels.com is, what Radisson Rewards and Accor are, and what Hilton / IHG / Marriott are getting close to becoming – then the ‘earn to burn’ ratio is steady.

  • Richard Peters says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:24

    As Matt over at Matts Planet says all these schemes are run for the benefit of the company not us so we have to deal with it or leave but I’m sure Amex know what they are doing and why they are doing it!

    • danimal says:
      10 Apr10 April 10:55

      Exactly this. Far too many people on here annoyed about how it effects them personally. Amex do not care about you as an individual. The card has to work for their business model. They’ve factored in that they may lose some cardholders as a result and clearly do not care, I imagine they probably want to get rid of a certain number.

      • Myriad says:
        10 Apr10 April 11:23

        They also factored in losing customers as part of the pro-rata refund end but that was informally put a halt to. There’s seemingly some drop they’re not willing to face.

      • Rob says:
        10 Apr10 April 11:32

        Fairer to say they’d actually like you to swap to an Amex-branded card and not a co-brand.

        Amex is paranoid about Chase at the moment, and if Chase did want to enter the UK market for an upmarket card then winning the BA contract off Amex at the next tender would be the best way to do it.

        Getting you onto Gold/Platinum makes you stickier. (Which, of course, is the same reason we don’t do Facebook Groups or anything like that – we want you on our platform, where we have more access to you and where an algorithm change can’t kill us.)

        • Paul says:
          10 Apr10 April 12:04

          They should be very worried about Chase. They are excellent.

          • CheshirePete says:
            10 Apr10 April 12:11

            Well, I did recently win a case against them with the ombudsman, so they are brilliant in that they had to give me £75. But in my mind they fail being ‘excellent’ as it shouldn’t have gone to the Ombudsman in the first place! The recent bonus of 1% for their saving account makes it 5.1% now until November, so yes they are ‘Good’, but their chat customer service has a lot to be desired and I’m still waiting for a formal apology since the ruling.

          • CarpalTravel says:
            10 Apr10 April 20:06

            Defiintley +1 to that.

        • TGLoyalty says:
          10 Apr10 April 12:57

          Isnt this one the U.K. legislation can be used fix? Wasnt co branding Amex cards an unintended consequence of the way the EU legislation went through?

        • LittleNick says:
          10 Apr10 April 18:21

          When is the next tender?

          • Rob says:
            10 Apr10 April 19:41

            I think the current deal was extended during covid as part of the conditions of Amex bailing out BA by pre-paying for £750m of Avios.

        • BoeingA340 says:
          10 Apr10 April 22:00

          I for one will welcome our new overlord Chase, maybe they won’t even charge the 3% non-sterling fee.

          • Rob says:
            10 Apr10 April 22:03

            I have not heard a whisper, from anyone, of a Chase card. Given how many partnerships they’d need to agree across the airlines and hotels, word would have got out.

    • BBbetter says:
      10 Apr10 April 11:23

      How dare you take away our entitlement to whinge, whine and moan about everything in life!
      Especially for retired / old people. What else do they do in the free time!

  • FEMW says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:24

    I have let Amex know through the app’s Leave Feedback that I am not happy! We still have the free BA card which could pay towards the flights. However, the council tax payment is a good one – we will look into that one. Forgot about Billhop – as the Ski hol company (Inghams) don’t use Amex but Crystal does.

  • Aardvark says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:28

    It all depends on your flying/route requirements. I do 2 South African holidays per year (BA and Virgin), the Amex £10K to get a BA Companion voucher was very easy for yearly spend (this year it took me under 3 months) so a £5K increase won’t be a problem. And doing a £10K spend on a Mastercard VA+ club is easy. So for me the BA and Virgin route works fine (Normally BA Bus both ways and Virgin Upper Class outgoing and Prem return). BA Bus both ways to Capetown (2 adults) works out as around £50 more than paying the cheapest cash price for normal Economy (almost a year in advance and including the new £300 charge). So for us it depends on your spending profile and compared to cash flights it is still a no brainer! – Or am I missing something!

  • Hampshirehog says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:32

    It’s this change increasing the spend threshold mid year which I think will make many folk, me included, very angry. Amex really seem to have lost the plot, they will surely struggle further with customer retention and spend yet more on marketing to replace those they’ve driven away

  • Rob says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:34

    Just hit 50,000 page views for the day by 10.30 – that’s about 7 hours ahead of schedule. Shame all the ads are sold on a flat fee basis 🙂

    • can2 says:
      10 Apr10 April 10:42

      your reward scheme needs adjusting, too Rob!

    • Gordon says:
      10 Apr10 April 10:43

      I guess you knew that would be the case with this article Rob!
      And the days not over yet!

    • The Savage Squirrel says:
      10 Apr10 April 11:05

      What’s your comments record? 😉

      • Gordon says:
        10 Apr10 April 11:19

        Has the below from 2020, been beaten yet Rob!

        https://www.headforpoints.com/2020/02/07/head-for-points-hits-400000-comments/

        • Gordon says:
          10 Apr10 April 11:23

          This was a cumulative figure though, so would be good to know a day figure!

        • Rob says:
          10 Apr10 April 11:27

          The app on my phone says we had 54,200 comments last year. This was actually a 10% drop on 2022 (despite a 12% growth in page views) as we successfully pushed more discussion into the forum.

          The numbers were a lot higher when we were running the daily chat thread on the main site.

          • Gordon says:
            10 Apr10 April 11:53

            Still good figures, Speaking of the forum, I’ve never visited it, maybe I should!

          • Maples says:
            10 Apr10 April 12:12

            Any chance you could add time stamps to when the posts are created?

          • Rob says:
            10 Apr10 April 12:17

            Articles go up at 3am, 4am and 5am. Total waste of space time stamping them. It’s not as if they are written 10 mins before publication.

            A good day on HfP is when we remove some unnecessary clutter from the site, not add some!

          • Maples says:
            10 Apr10 April 12:12

            Posts, as in these articles*

    • BBbetter says:
      10 Apr10 April 11:24

      You could start ‘surge pricing’ Amex for ads whenever they have such ‘enhancements’.

    • gary says:
      13 Apr13 April 08:03

      You need dynamic ad pricing Rob😏

      Great article as usual 👍

  • Matt says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:48

    This is expected due to the lack of competition in the rewards market as Amex is little competition – due to the interchange regulation of Visa and Mastercard Amex is the only game in town. It makes little sense for Barclays to improve their offering as their offering as it stands now seems a lot better given the reduction in the BA card’s benefits.

    • meta says:
      10 Apr10 April 13:55

      Interchange fees also apply to Amex. Amex is certainly not the only game in town well not anymore.

  • Gary says:
    10 Apr10 April 10:49

    If Amex BAPP would just allow the simple functionality of triggering its voucher anytime within a card year (like Barclaycard Avios), Amex should recoup what they are trying to gain from annual fee increase & commission lost due to people holding off spending at £9500.

    • meta says:
      10 Apr10 April 13:57

      Amex 241 voucher is triggered as soon as you hit the spend target and that has been the case since the card has been introduced. Not sure what you’re talking about.

      • HampshireHog says:
        10 Apr10 April 15:34

        obviously an option would be to defer triggering the voucher

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

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