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

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As we have been predicting for some time, British Airways has announced the move to revenue-based tier status.

The net effect is that earning Gold status will now be very, very difficult, bordering on impossible, for leisure travellers.

Some changes are unexpected – the speed of the launch (1st April) and a rebranding of British Airways Executive Club to ‘The British Airways Club’. Whilst a bit more 21st century, it’s ironic given that only ‘executive’ travellers are now likely to qualify for the higher tiers.

British Airways Club membership cards

Here are the new British Airways status thresholds that kick in from 1st April 2025:

  • Bronze: 3,500 points
  • Silver: 7,500 points
  • Gold: 20,000 points
  • Gold Guest List – new member: 65,000 points (with at least 52,000 earned through British Airways-marketed flights and British Airways Holidays)
  • Gold Guest List – renewal: 40,000 points (with at least 32,000 earned through British Airways-marketed flights British Airways Holidays)

There will be milestone bonuses of 2,500 Avios at 5,500 tier points, 4,000 Avios at 11,000 tier points and 5,000 Avios at 16,000 tier points which will be triggered on the way to Gold. Assuming 1p per Avios of value these are not exactly generous.

These changes were made “based on our Members’ feedback” according to BA’s press release so if you don’t like them, you only have yourself to blame.

What is a ‘point’?

1 point = £1 of spending on British Airways-marketed flights.

ONLY the base fare and BA-imposed surcharges are included. Airport charges, Air Passenger Duty etc are NOT included. Seat selection and luggage fees ARE included.

On a £11,990 fully flexible ticket to New York in Club World, virtually all spend (£11,687) would qualify towards status. On a £387 economy flight to New York, only £189 of spend would count.

There are other ways of earning ‘points’

You will be able to earn up to 1,000 points per year by purchasing Sustainable Aviation Fuel credits. You will get 1 tier point and 10 Avios per £1 spent on SAF credits.

You will be able to earn up to 2,500 points per year via spending on the British Airways Premium Plus American Express credit card. It isn’t clear what the ‘conversion rate’ will be – I suspect something close to 1 point per £10 spent.

You will earn 1 point per £1 spent at British Airways Holidays. For high end leisure travellers this could be an attractive way of earning status. However, BA has potentially messed this up because tier points will be split equally between all travellers. You can’t book a £20,000 holiday for a family of four and get Gold – in fact, at 5,000 points each, you wouldn’t even all get Silver.

(What you COULD do is book a BA Holiday – flight and hotel – for one person, and then have the rest of your family book their flights separately. This ensures that you receive all the tier points.)

One upside is that there will no longer be a minimum stay requirement for earning via BA Holidays.

What happens with partner flights?

You will earn tier points based on a percentage of miles flown for non-alliance partners.

For Malaysia Airlines, for example, it will increase from 2% of miles flown on a discounted Economy ticket to 30% of miles flown for a fully flexible First Class ticket.

This structure means that it is VERY unattractive for people buying flexible tickets to choose a partner airline over British Airways. For low cost premium cabin tickets it is probably roughly equal – eg Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur in discounted Business Class on Malaysia Airlines would earn 1,600 tier points under the new structure which is roughly what a £2,000 sale cash ticket on BA would earn.

Some airlines are rewarded more generously. Qatar Airways, for example, earns 25% of miles flown in deeply discounted Business Class. This is double what you receive for flying Malaysia Airlines.

There will be bonus tier points for the first few months

Flights booked BEFORE 14th February for travel after 1st April will earn bonus points. It isn’t clear if these are one-way or return, I suspect one-way:

  • Euro Traveller: 50 points
  • Club Europe: 100 points
  • World Traveller: 70 points
  • World Traveller Plus: 140 points 
  • Club World: 210 points
  • First: 330 points

These are bizarrely small numbers based on the new tier thresholds. 420 bonus tier points for a Club World return flight isn’t going to make much impact on hitting 20,000 tier points for Gold.

What happens with existing bookings for travel after 1st April?

It’s not clear. We are told:

“Customers who already hold bookings for travel after 1 April 2025 will be awarded Tier Points based on a conversion of the existing method. Any existing bookings will earn proportionally the same number of Tier Points, or more, as they would today.”

The implication is that it will be based on the same % of status as you would need today. A flight earning 140 tier points (currently 23% of Silver or 9% of Gold) will presumably earn somewhere between 23% of the new Silver threshold (7,500 points) or 9% of the new Gold threshold (20,000 points).

The implication is that this only applies to existing bookings made before today. If you book today, you will be on the new system for travel from 1st April.

What happens with existing BA Holidays bookings for travel by 30th June?

People have booked with BA Holidays expecting double tier points (for trips taken between 1st April and 30th June) based on the current tier point system.

On paper you won’t be worse off. The tier points you would have got will be multiplied by 13.5 and then doubled. Trust me that this is fair.

The bigger issue is that if you will need additional tier points for status, the gap is bigger. For example, if your BA Holiday would have got you halfway to Silver it still will – but you’d still need to spend £3,750 to earn the other half of the points needed.

British AIrways Club status changes

Are ‘soft landings’ remaining?

It isn’t clear. However, a BA employee has told me that they will be removed. If correct, a Gold member will now drop directly to Blue.

What is happening to Lifetime Gold?

Your existing tier points will be converted. Take a look at the FAQ here for details.

Conclusion

This is, clearly, a pivotal move by British Airways. It is effectively washing its hands of the leisure market and going all-in to attract the dwindling band of full fare business travellers.

With Gold now available for just over one and a half £12,000 fully flexible Club World return flights to New York, it is clear who the target market now is.

Realistically, it will now be impossible to earn Gold for small business travellers, economy travellers or self-funded leisure travellers. Even Silver will be a major stretch. British Airways Holidays spend could have offered a lifeline, but by splitting the tier points equally among all travellers it’s not going to make any real impact.

It’s not clear to me why BAEC members asked for this, since it was done ‘based on member feedback’ according to BA but that’s people for you ….!

It will also be virtually impossible for corporate travellers to earn Gold status based on economy travel. This leads to the question of why you’d even want to push for status – if the only people who can earn status are flying in Business Class, they don’t need Silver status anyway as they have the benefits. Gold doesn’t add much on top.

The long term issue remains. Business travellers have their flights paid for by their employers. Many of these are tied to BA or oneworld via a route deal. Many get huge end-of-year rebates which means their headline spend is not what they actually pay – in reality business travellers with a high rebate will need to spend LESS to earn status than leisure travellers. BA is rewarding ‘loyalty’ from people whose loyalty is contractually enforced on them.

Remove status from those people who DO have a choice of airline – leisure travellers, small business owners – and their reasons for flying British Airways shrink dramatically.

What I don’t understand is why the offsets for leisure and SME travellers are so half-hearted. Capping credit card tier points at 2,500 is pathetic – just 12.5% of what you need for Gold and still leaving you £5,000 of ‘before taxes’ BA spend short of Silver. American Airlines now lets you earn status based ENTIRELY on credit card and partner spend if you wish. If someone wants to put £200,000 through their BA Amex to earn Gold status, why not let them?

The British Airways Club, of course, is not the only game in town for earning oneworld status. I suspect that most people will now find it easier to earn Silver or Gold-equivalent status via another oneworld airline – you would get virtually the same benefits except for Gold access to additional Economy Avios inventory. We’ll be looking at these options in detail as we get nearer to April.

As a starter, remember that oneworld member Royal Jordanian will give you 12-months of BA Bronze-equivalent status for just $49 if you have hotel or airline elite status elsewhere – click here to read more.

You can find out more about these changes on this special page of ba.com.

PS. If you are reading this but are not a regular reader, please consider signing up for our FREE daily or weekly newsletters full of the latest Avios, airline, hotel and credit card points news. Visit this page of the site or click any of the ‘Subscribe’ links on this page.

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (3839)

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

  • John says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:12

    Whilst the points websites were yesterday tripping over themselves to be the first to announce the changes on FT. Strategically these changes now sign the termination warrants of these points websites – they ll be the next Woolworths and Debenhams. People will lose interest in points collection in general. If these sites had shares they would have tanked this morning

    • Rob says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:18

      I think you’re confusing redeemable points with status points, and HfP spends VERY little time covering the latter. There are ways it intertwines but they are two distinct topics. Obviously we’ll end up retiring a few articles on tier points but there will be increased interest in cheap business class deals on other airlines (and almost all airlines except BA pay us when readers book flights).

      Collecting redeemable miles via flights hasn’t been attractive for about 10 years, to be honest 🙂 I suspect I earned fewer than 5,000 Avios from flying BA last year. In contrast, in the last month I earned 170,000 Amex points from upgrading my wife’s Gold to Platinum and banking 80k for my trouble plus another 90k as the referral limit reset.

      Flyertalk has a high % of business travellers on it. I suspect Turning Left for Less has the highest % of tier point running readers, because that is what Michelle has always done and what she likes writing about.

      Experience from the US shows that the trashing of SkyMiles etc hasn’t impacted the big sites much at all. Frequent Miler just published its 2024 P&L and was flat on 2023 despite a hit from reduced Google traffic after the algo changes – looks like revenue was about $2.6m which isn’t bad for four people.

      • John says:
        31 Dec31 December 08:21

        It will just become a spaghetti of random J class deals. I thought luxury flyer site masters that like no other

        • Rob says:
          31 Dec31 December 08:31

          Those sites cannot scale. Oddly, whilst you don’t exactly need a PhD to book a cheap flight, sites like Luxury Flight Club love to present their information in a way which only someone with a decade of Flyertalk experience can follow. The skill is all in the presentation which people like us can do very well.

      • John says:
        31 Dec31 December 08:24

        Also most folk aren’t in the game of swapping credit cards in and out. It’s unduly complicated and starts to screw with your credit file. I m sure new niches will emerge but no denying this is not an insignificant change

    • Richie says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:21

      I can’t get a discount for paying cash for milk from my local farmer, so the points game for me will continue.

  • Mark Janes says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:15

    I’m mostly a leisure traveller. My approach will be to maximize Avios accrual through Amex, the BA shopping portal and “boost my Avios”. I’ll use them to fund my Inverness-London trips (economy out, business return) and European short-haul business. For everything else I’ll just take my pick of airlines, buy fast-track security and use Priority Pass or the champagne and seafood bar. (You can buy a lot of champagne and seafood for £20,000!). I think the trick is to focus on the benefits and how to get them or their equivalents, and not the “status”.

    • Steven says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:43

      I’m thinking similarly. I live in Glasgow and often end up overspending hopping through London on CE for TP, so it’ll be quite liberating not feeling the need to do that now! The easyJet Plus card and Plat Amex achieve basically the same for me as Silver but for a lot less and with much better routing. And you can buy an empty seat next to you to recreate CE 🤣

      I think it’s weird to imagine this’ll help BA Holidays, there’s far, far, FAR better value for quality hotels available elsewhere, but again I’ve been using BAH for DTP, so in reality this’ll save me and should get more interesting packages from the likes of Secret Escapes.

      Will run down Avios in 2025/6 to maximise Gold benefits through redemptions, no point doing cash fares now unless they’re rock bottom. But will redeem as I earn after that, as I agree with others that the writing is on the wall for Avios mileage based redemptions, so def don’t want to be stuck with a million worthless Avios!!

  • Geek says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:17

    Business lounge crowding isn’t solely due to status. A huge contributor is volume of Euro short haul with 48 Club seats (12 rows) a flight.

    There’s a question in long term if gutting a loyalty programme supports such high numbers of Club Europe seats. But in short term I don’t think you’ll notice much change in April 2026

    • CJD says:
      31 Dec31 December 15:32

      How many of those full short haul cabins, particularly on routes like Sofia, are full of people gaming the system?

  • Lou says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:17

    I just remembered I’ve got Gold with Virgin (did the status match with them, and haven’t flown with them since..). Does anybody know what airlines I can do a status match with (*A preferred) with it before it expires in March? Thanks!

  • NFH says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:29

    I remember that when I first started flying with British Airways in the 1990s, no tier points or miles were earnt on most economy fares, only on fully flexible economy fares and on any fare in other cabin classes. British Airways seems to be heading back in that direction, alienating leisure travellers and rewarding only high-spending business travellers. This is an odd decision given that business travel is dwindling after the pandemic proved the effectiveness of remote working. This is a decision by businesses that airlines cannot reverse by rewarding individual workers. British Airways should have realised that its future lies more with leisure travel than with business travel.

    • George says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:32

      Business travel has declined but business travellers presumably pay more than leisure travellers so the % of profit coming from them might still be high

  • AJA says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:31

    This is an unwelcome change from a cost perspective as it makes status much more expensive for me as a self funded leisure traveller.

    I will lose Bronze by the end of March as a result of the tier point earning year alignment and had been considering a BAHoliday in May which would have got it back but the bringing forward of the dates to 31 March has scuppered that.

    On the other hand I welcome the ability to earn TP via my BAPP spend. I hope all spend will count and it’s not that you only start earning TPs when you’ve hit the threshold for the 2-4-1. It is possible a combination of BAH and BAPP spend may get me back to Bronze anyway. I doubt I will get back to Silver and no chance of getting Gold but that was true even before now.

    • Paul says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:40

      Why would you chase Bronze?

      • Lou says:
        31 Dec31 December 08:45

        Seat selection 7 days before is pretty decent and you’re likely to get what you wanted as if you had paid for it.

        • Paul says:
          31 Dec31 December 08:50

          But many airlines don’t charge for seat selection. I get people might chase silver but to spend £3500 before taxes and fees just to save £30 on seat fees seems odd. My son is blue now and when he went to book his seat recently at -24hr he had most of the plane available and it was packed when he flew

          • Lou says:
            31 Dec31 December 08:59

            Also, BA flights to Europe are competing with Wizz, Ryanair and easyJet, all charging for seats. Even Luftie charges for seats these days

        • Alexthenotsogreat says:
          31 Dec31 December 08:52

          I agree, I value Bronze quite highly for the 7 days seat selection and also priority check-in (which has saved me long queues both with BA in Edinburgh and various overseas o/w airports this year)

      • masaccio says:
        31 Dec31 December 08:50

        Seat selection 7 days in advance? Likely enough to get you something half decent.

        • Lou says:
          31 Dec31 December 08:57

          The thing that will probably get me choosing BA over another airline will probably be me having bronze+the generous hand luggage allowance. It’s picking at crumbs, but still worth around £60-80 each way

      • chris1922 says:
        31 Dec31 December 08:53

        If you’ve ever turned up at Glasgow airport at 4 in the morning on the first day of the school holidays with an economy ticket, that Bronze status is worth its weight in gold….

      • Barry Flyer says:
        31 Dec31 December 09:21

        Bronze / Group 3 generally also means you avoid Gate Agents forcibly trying to check in your wheelie bag (very common at City Airport)

    • Ewen says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:53

      As a leisure traveller have no chance now of retaining Gold. I have noticed the lounges in LHR are now packed but would it not have been better to just change the tier point structure to say

      2500 Gold or 2000
      1500 silver
      1000 bronze
      I will miss the perks like extra baggage, seat selection on reservation and a warm Gold welcome occasionally. Gold dedicated line etc etc.
      probably look at KLM/Delta now or Star Alliance for long haul.

      why change for change sake-rant over!!

  • Colin MacKinnon says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:33

    The suggestion and then planning for this must have started at least six months ago.

    My suspicion is that the market has changed since then – and not for better.

    Companies are finding it harder and leisure flyers – judging by retail sales in the run-up to Xmas – are also about to cut back.

    This looks like it could be a great business school lesson in the future.

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
      31 Dec31 December 08:43

      6 months?

      More like 6 years. Alex Cruz wanted this when he was Chief Exec!

      • Bagoly says:
        31 Dec31 December 09:16

        Very much looks like an Alex Cruz action.
        What more did he start off that has yet to be “delivered” ?

  • Alexthenotsogreat says:
    31 Dec31 December 08:36

    Is it likely Iberia’s programme will make a similar change in the very near future? If not, from some very quick crunching of numbers, it might work better for me to credit my flights to them in May/June next year

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