BIG NEWS: BA moves to revenue-based tier status for Bronze, Silver, Gold and Gold Guest List

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• Zain says:

  14 Jan14 January 15:04

  There’s a lot of talk about ‘going solo’ on BAH bookings and the rest of the family flying on a separate PNR. How does this work in practice? We’re looking at an all-inclusive holiday in May and I’m not inclined to ring up the resort to review their policy on a couple of additional family members turning up so would love to hear if anyone’s experienced this recently.

  • Rob says:

    14 Jan14 January 15:16

    How is anyone meant to know? This new policy was announced 2 weeks ago. Historically it made sense to include everyone because everyone got the bonus tier points.

    • LittleNick says:

      14 Jan14 January 16:46

      Do you think perhaps BA might soften here and give the total TPs to each passenger? So if the total is £4k then each passenger gets 4000 TPs?

      • JDB says:

        14 Jan14 January 17:02

        It would be very good if they did, but it would seem quite odd when you have moved to a revenue based TP system to give a family of four 16,000 TPs on a £4k booking particularly when they are already ignoring the taxes on holidays.

        • LittleNick says:

          14 Jan14 January 17:21

          True, maybe it could be an introductory offer for BA Holidays like the Double TP offer for BA Holidays on the old system

        • ken says:

          15 Jan15 January 11:33

          Its not a £4k booking, its £16k

          I’m not sure how many people with kids make them pay their own fare.

          What possible point is there for a child to earn tier points ?

          A £16k family holiday will have a heavy hotel element with juicy margins for BA with zero capital involved plus premium fares which is the profitable part of their business.

          Seems odd that £16k of spend which earns BA a high margin, only gets you just over halfway to silver.

          These kind of holidays hold zero appeal and never have done, so no skin in this game.

      • secretsquirrel says:

        15 Jan15 January 07:40

        Can’t believe people would even contemplate splitting family up on flights then having to discuss with hotel staff that your adding on more people to your room / F&B package. All this for status perks. Fly Business and you get most of the perks anyway.

        • Kaye says:

          15 Jan15 January 08:54

          The thing that makes me laugh about this, is all the disparaging comments about people ‘gaming the system’. This suggestion is exactly the same.

  • Ilou says:

    14 Jan14 January 16:46

    It will be tricky to do this for AI hotels as pricing is quite often by person/type of room so might not be possible

    For traditional hotels, I always book for 2 adults and turn up with the kids as long as max number of people is respected (sometimes you pay extra city tax & when required)

    Honestly BA should give the option to split or all go to head of the household.. they are getting the monies after all !

    • Norfolk&Chance says:

      14 Jan14 January 17:09

      Where do the kids sleep?

      • Ilou says:

        14 Jan14 January 21:02

        Same room, I book suite or 2 bedroom villa in resorts .. my kids are young

    • Steven says:

      14 Jan14 January 17:57

      It is probably in their interests to allow the main booker to nominate themselves to take all the points as otherwise it is a deterrent to actually use BA holidays (as you will have to split your points you would get from flying).

      My plan is when travelling only with my other half is to book a BA holiday for me with hotel and a separate flight for my wife. She doesn’t need the points, I do.

      When travelling with the kids on assumption we need two rooms call the hotel in advance to make sure I can join the two bookings and make the rooms interconnecting and have wife and kids on a separate BA holiday booking.

      If I can’t make that work I will just not do a BA holiday.

      Madness and a lot of unnecessary admin.

    • GUWonder says:

      14 Jan14 January 20:25

      But BA wants to cut the number of its loyalty program members entitled to “free” lounge access on the basis of loyalty program elite status. And this BA Holidays thing is a way of diluting the spend giving “too many” people lounge-granting elite status.

      BA can’t be very happy with increased contract lounge costs for the elite status economy class-flying passengers on its planes.

      • Ilou says:

        14 Jan14 January 21:01

        They make very decent commissions from it so it’s justified to give something back

  • Dubious says:

    14 Jan14 January 23:55

    You include them in the booking but omit their BA Club number, so that only the lead traveller has the option to earn points.

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

      15 Jan15 January 02:19

      Don’t think that’s how it works.

      It appears that if there are two people on the holiday the points will get divided by 2 and the booker will only get half – even if the 2nd passenger isn’t in the club. Their share just gets lost.

    • Zain says:

      15 Jan15 January 05:40

      That’s not how the new rules work

      • Ilou says:

        15 Jan15 January 07:13

        We don’t know yet ! BA gave an example where points gets split, we don’t know what happens if no FF is added

        • JDB says:

          15 Jan15 January 07:51

          @llou – we do! As several people have posted, no FF and the points are lost. You say BA gets a decent commission, so it’s justified to give something back, but they already are. The new scheme for holidays is more generous than flight only.

    • Rob says:

      15 Jan15 January 07:25

      No, that’s not how it works.

    • secretsquirrel says:

      15 Jan15 January 07:43

      Doesn’t work like that, system recognises if more than one person on the booking, then splits out TP’s accordingly

      • Adam says:

        15 Jan15 January 09:49

        Which surely isn’t entirely different to how it was before, or? Tier points were always divided up amongst travellers and if someone didn’t have a BAEC account they didn’t get any points. Plus hotel spend didn’t earn anything so didn’t count anyway. As I understand it the only difference now (albeit a biggie) is that the tiers are away up in the stratosphere but hotel and car rental spend also now counts (albeit divided by the number in the party).

        • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

          15 Jan15 January 10:19

          Nonsense.

          Under the old scheme anyone on a BA Hols booking with an exec club number got the same number of TPs as the booker – including the 2x offer.

        • Adam says:

          15 Jan15 January 10:34

          I think we’re saying the same thing, just differently. In the old world, if I booked 2x long-haul Club rtn each traveller would get 280 tier points. There was no world where I would get all the ‘available’ tier points. And now if I book the same each traveller still gets the same number of tier points as each other (although, sadly, we don’t know quite how many that would be).

        • Rob says:

          15 Jan15 January 10:59

          That’s true. However …. BA is making a huge song and dance about how BA Holidays is a way of boosting your tier points, to help close the ludicrous gap between the current and new thresholds. This is bull UNLESS it allows one person to take all the tier points.

          I mean … come on … I’d need to spend £30k on a holiday if I wanted to get Silver for myself, assuming all four of us go. I’m not doing that – I have spent that sort of cash on a holiday but the sort of hotel you book through that is the sort where you directly negotiate rooms / benefits (or get Emyr to do it), not by using BA Holidays and having the hotel see it as Expedia.

        • Adam says:

          15 Jan15 January 11:08

          Oh, for sure, I’m not saying I like it. In fact, it stinks, not least of all because they dressed it up as a gift from the gods rather than the steaming pile of disenguinity that it actually is. The dirty dogs.

• GUWonder says:

  15 Jan15 January 12:28

  Just goes to show how much contempt BA has for its current crop of elite status members. It doesn’t take much imagination to think BA were thinking of just about all of their customers as “the over-entitled” (elite or otherwise). But this is the natural course for those into cost-cutting: “we give our customers too much, they are over-entitled, we need to wean them from their expectations and charge them more while giving them less”. That is the mentality of these management types.

  • RC says:

    15 Jan15 January 13:11

    Too true. You can even see that in what JDB posts. They claim to be in BA, and if they’re not a troll, then some of their comments also show the contempt to customers. All focused on how we should look at profitability not our own lives experiences. If so, it rather shows how much this (ultimately service) company has become utterly detached from its customers. Even Ryanair understands that without its customers it is nothing. The BA attitude seems to be that customers are an annoyance to be tolerated.
    The Flying Blue offer is very timely: for all his faults, at least Ben Smith understands customers.

• Namster says:

  15 Jan15 January 15:18

  OMG BA glassdoor reviews

  • Adam says:

    15 Jan15 January 15:32

    If, as posted earlier, many cabin crew are able to earn decent status by virtue of many flights in nice cabins at discounted rates then these new rules may in one stroke have massively vexed a large swathe of BA employees as well.

    If it was possible for them to get any more hacked off, this may just have done it. Oof!

• Garethgerry says:

  15 Jan15 January 15:40

  @Rob , you mention Emyr as an affiliate, for booking travel at up market resorts. Couldn’t find which one of your Affiliate he was. We use Elegant resorts but always useful to see if someone else can get better deal (as in personal service , best rooms at hotel , not necessarily cheapest).

  Thanks

  • Rob says:

    15 Jan15 January 16:39

    Fill in the form here – https://www.headforpoints.com/virtuoso-agent-london/ – although you need to be specific about what you’re looking at.

• Chris says:

  15 Jan15 January 16:21

  Amex just turned up with a 60k sign on bonus for the BAPP. Let’s see what else they have in store, I imagine it’s panic stations all over now.

  • George K says:

    15 Jan15 January 16:35

    It doesn’t appear public yet – did you get an email? I got an email about the Business BA Amex (which is of no use to me…)

    • Numpty says:

      15 Jan15 January 17:02

      its on the BA website.

  • JDB says:

    15 Jan15 January 18:42

    Why panic stations? It’s an annual event! A bumper offer of 70k appeared in Jan 2023, then 50,000 in Jan 2024, now 60,000. If you were suggesting the panic might relate to the TP changes, the voucher, plus now the ability to earn 2,500 TP makes it increasingly attractive.

    • RC says:

      15 Jan15 January 19:09

      Earn *up to* 2500 TPs, not 2500.
      As yet unexplained by either BA or Amex, which if that isn’t a half baked panic measure, I’m not sure what else is. Yet neither can explain how it will work. Three weeks after the announcement.
      I think everyone can draw their own conclusions conclusion here about ‘panic’.

      BA also sending out targeted emails offering discounts up to 20pct off future bookings. A few mates who’ve stopped booking BA after the great ‘two fingers to customers’ brunch have got them. That’s definitely panic stuff.
      But any ‘management’ that has to hire McKinsey to tell them how to manage is past its sell by date.

      • Adam says:

        15 Jan15 January 20:41

        20% off future bookings? Disaster! How can one expect to achieve any kind of status with such calamitous crashes in prices. I personally have vowed to book no more flights on BA until I receive a targeted email offering a personalised price increase of at least 20%. Only then shall I feel truly treasured.

        • RC says:

          15 Jan15 January 21:16

          The paradox that discounts to encourage a return now have a negative impact of perceived loyalty status.
          It’s a bit of an incentives quandary BA have got themselves into. Unintentional consequences already coming out .

      • JDB says:

        15 Jan15 January 22:30

        I think you have misunderstood what “up to” means! It means that you can earn a lower number at lower spend thresholds up to a maximum total of 2,500.

        • RC says:

          16 Jan16 January 00:53

          Condescension.
          Meaning: Not a logical way to discuss factual points unless you seek to deflect a position of weakness in a discussion where you have lost all factual arguments.

        • RC says:

          16 Jan16 January 01:02

          Explain for everyone how this will work then.
          Because BA and Amex can’t . After 3 weeks.
          Looks like a panic measure to me.

        • RC says:

          16 Jan16 January 01:10

          I think you misunderstand the point.
          Which is a point in itself, because ex BA employees and secondees do talk of stake 70s style boys club culture unable to listen or ‘get’ outside points. Hence having to pay McKinsey to tell you what think.
          For relevance here, that means we won’t see any revisions. But just the slow rot as BA has misjudged the appetite of LHG and AFKLM to follow (just like other disastrous decisions.)

    • Ziggy says:

      16 Jan16 January 10:36

      I really hate to keep piling in, but you will insist on making statements which cannot be supported by evidence available in the public domain.

      This time you’re claiming that because the BAPP will allow cardholders to earn 2,500 TPs, that “makes it increasingly attractive” … but we don’t yet know what the spend threshold will be to earn the full 2,500 TP.

      Given that BA seems intent on making elite status considerably harder to earn, it seems unlikely that the threshold will be set low. And how attractive will the bonus TPs make the card if the threshold is very high?

      Guestimates suggest that it may take £25,000 of spending to earn those tier points, and that’s not an irrelevant sum of money for most people, so claiming that the ability to earn bonus TPs will make the card “increasingly more attractive” is a little ridiculous.

      Yes, the ability to earn TPs from cc spending may be interesting in a “tell me more” sort of way, but there’s no evidence to support the claim that this makes the BAPP “increasingly attractive”.

      • RC says:

        16 Jan16 January 12:24

        @JDB is a probably a troll, or might be might be employed by BA to counter negative social media.
        If it’s the latter, it’s looking increasingly counterproductive. As you point out, every post or claim disintegrates when challenged with facts and data.

        • StanTheMan says:

          16 Jan16 January 15:36

          patrick – totally agree. no other explanation

        • JDB says:

          17 Jan17 January 06:57

          @RC if you had been reading this site for any length of time, you would know that I am most definitely not a BA fanboy! I am probably negatively affected by the TP changes but that’s not a basis for endless criticism of the management so some balance is needed and when you talk of year by year devaluation of Avios and the BAEC, that’s simply not true if you look back at redemptions from when the CV was first launched, and particularly the introduction of peak/off peak. The cash element grew but that represented a relatively small part of the total and grew less than air ticket inflation generally.

          As with most businesses, it has some good bits and bad bits. If you offered a more balanced view, one could take it more seriously.

      • JDB says:

        16 Jan16 January 15:55

        The simple fact is that for £300 you already get the companion voucher at £15k which easily covers that annual fee by itself. In addition, you get an extra ½ Avios per £1 and now additionally, on a regular basis (as opposed to the trial that ran Nov 23 to May 24) you will have the ability to earn 2,500 new style tier points. The trial offered 200 old TP (so consistent with the proposed 2,500) for £25,000 but did not start that at the prevailing £10k voucher spend although some are suggesting that the new £15k threshold could become a starting point. As all TP years are now aligned but Amex ones are not, it makes things a bit more complicated.

        Given the total spent on the BA Amex, clearly even for spend over £15k, this would still be achievable for many. Anyway, nobody is forcing anyway to apply for or retain that card, but for us with three BAPP cards in the household, it’s an added attraction.

        PS. I would like to add a personal thank you for the gratuitous abuse directed at me from the usual people (most of whom are are rare and not helpful posters, two of whom haven’t even contributed to this debate) in these pages partly as I relish such abuse which confirms, as Mrs Thatcher said, that all the political arguments have been lost.

        • RC says:

          16 Jan16 January 16:43

          That’s pure fantasy and conjecture on your part.
          Nowhere have BA or Amex disclosed how the UP TO 2500 Tp will work.

          So for the third time, beyond pure fantasy speculation on your part, there isn’t anything factual is there?

          Also love to hear your response for why BA is so badly performing compared to Iberia’s margin, RoCE and CFRoI? You’ve ignored that four times since you falsely claimed BA was better than any other airline.

        • RC says:

          16 Jan16 January 16:56

          All sounds very like an ex- cabinet minister trying to defend the indefensible like Chris Pincher.
          Reaching to bring Thatcher into it. Oh dear oh dear. The sane Thatcher who handkerchiefed the ghastly world tailfins fiasco?
          Still waiting for the clarity on Amex rather than diversionary irrelevant stuff on Avios.

        • patrick says:

          16 Jan16 January 18:01

          The ever-delightful, humble JDB casually compares himself to Margaret Thatcher. We are all so lucky that he has the time to patronise us.

        • Steve says:

          16 Jan16 January 19:27

          Not sure* that quoting her in any context is going to win hearts and minds here JDB, but then perhaps that aspect doesn’t concern you.

          *I am absolutely sure as it happens.

        • JDB says:

          17 Jan17 January 06:40

          @RC – I’m afraid I don’t recall you making any point re Iberia’s margins etc. I also haven’t said BA is the ‘best’ airline but merely that, while you comprehensively trash the management that its figures consistently show it outperforming other European network carriers, with BA having more than double the margins of AFKL and margins more than a third higher than the LH group. The management is doing something right, year in year out although you say they couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag. In respect of Iberia’s margins (and some other metrics) being superior, I would have thought the reasons were quite obvious and are regularly discussed at capital markets days, analyst/investor presentations. While BA has a huge structural advantage in having its base in London/SE, LHR is a significantly more expensive hub to operate from than MAD in virtually every respect and BA has legacy cost and unionisation issues (some also suffered by the above mentioned groups) that don’t affect Iberia which also has the capacity to operate the largest domestic network in Europe. Operating out of a very congested hub in Northern Europe has its own specific costs.

      • JDB says:

        17 Jan17 January 06:49

        @Ziggy – there weren’t a whole lot of complaints when the threshold was £25,000 to earn 200 tier points (equating to roughly the 2,500 and the same third of the silver requirement) during the trial. It’s going to be a new and additional benefit on a card that’s already an attractive product, so yes, the ability to earn TP’s will make it even more attractive for many. While you correctly say £25k not an irrelevant sum of money, in view of the £1bn+ that is spent on the card and the reported average income of HfP readers and the money they report blowing on holidays on this site, plenty of people will be earning those 2,500 points.

        • Tocsin says:

          17 Jan17 January 11:22

          Probably because most people ignored that ‘offer’ unless their regular CC spend pattern (expenses/ work purchases?) made it an easy target.
          In general, the BAPP was a spend for the companion voucher, then solely on BA flights if bookings not totally planned.
          It was about as relevant as the current ‘book by 14 Feb for bonus’

    • CJD says:

      16 Jan16 January 20:28

      There was also 60,000 in the 3 months or so leading up to Christmas 2023.

• Wis says:

  15 Jan15 January 18:29

  Not sure I follow the line of thinking about panic stations. I would have thought BA would be receiving a major revenue bump this quarter (flights and BA Hols) from people trying to re-qualify status before the end of March. At the same time, the reduction in flying due engine issues will be driving up load factors and prices. I wouldn’t have thought the EC changes will be evident in lower revenue at all. I could be very wrong of course!

• CheshirePete says:

  15 Jan15 January 20:41

  I’d still love to know what James Hillier would make of all this!

  • RC says:

    15 Jan15 January 21:09

    ‘after listening to customer feedback’, he status matched to Flying Blue and said ‘au revoir’.

    If nothing else AFKLM must be minting it in £99 fees. Laughing all the way to the bank.

  • Dave says:

    16 Jan16 January 15:38

    Hillier was never in charge, he was merely a figurehead whose name appeared on the emails.

• Greeny says:

  16 Jan16 January 00:31

  BA holidays
  If your children are 11 years old and under a flight booked with BA is charged at 30% of the adults fare. Hotels typically charge children at a reduced rate. Some packages have child free places. In BA new scheme the total cost is divided by 4. So actual TP earned by the adults are reduced by the children. Should the scheme not be based on Adult cost = TP Children Cost = TP but this cost would be less
  Also if children get status although they can travel alone they can’t gain access to lounge unless with someone 16 or over
  So to me this is a cynical proposition to prevent status both for parents and children even if you did want to spend 30k plus

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    16 Jan16 January 13:12

    Do kids really get a 70% discount with BA holidays? I’m surprised at that.

    Anyway not going to happen as it would reveal too much about the internal pricing of the trip.

    Also do you really expect them to allocate time and money to making the necessary IT changes to implement this?

    Best to keep it simple.

    Also kids are already earning status of their own.

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