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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.

  • Pete says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:07

    What happens if you book a flight with companion fair then purchase car hire and hotel with BA holidays. Do you get tier points for that portion of cost.

  • Geek says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:09

    Managers will be focused on income lines following this change and I think the initially shocking one will a precipitous drop in BA Holidays bookings.

    The double tier point offer has driven lots of customers to book packages rather than stand alone flights. It’s clearly highly successful at driving sales otherwise it wouldn’t have been running for years!

    Although I think BA might not see too much change in flight bookings overall following this loyalty change, there’s much weaker rationale for a customer to add a car or hotel and so although flight load factors might not drop too much, the percentage booked via BAH may drop off a cliff.

    (If I were them the safer option would have been to grandfather a BAH deal into the new system (‘for the first six months, two tier points per BA holiday spend’) and use that as a test and adjust.)

    I think this change is too precipitous and we may see squeaky bums and double tier points quite quickly on holiday spend. Let’s wait.

    • tomahawk says:
      1 Jan1 January 13:21

      I’m not sure about this – see my 12:56 post. Certainly short haul economy bookings via BA holidays are significantly better in terms of TP accumulation than before unless you are going for 2 nights and staying in a 2 star hotel.

      • Throwawayname says:
        1 Jan1 January 13:39

        My average hotel spend in Europe is under €100 per night, and I stay in 4-star ones about 70% of the time (15% 3-star, 10% Ibis, 5% 5-star). I often travel solo, so that’d be €50pppn, and that’s before the 5-7% rebate and any loyalty promotions, which can also be substantial (e.g. $15 for booking on the app my €62 one-night stay in the local 4-star NH when I was passing through Valladolid).

        You’d need to spend some serious amount of time out there in order to get to a four-figure sum per person. I do obviously appreciate that high-end resorts are a completely different ballgame.

        • Rob says:
          1 Jan1 January 13:51

          If you’re booking a high end resort, you are likely to be doing it via someone like Emyr or at the very least booking direct, because you generally have more control over room categories etc. The only exception in my mind would be if I was booking a named suite in a particular hotel where there is little chance anything could go wrong, and where I wouldn’t want any upgrade from using Emyr and where the $100 F&B credit was too small to bother me.

          For example, where we are now is a resort with a handful of connecting rooms which cannot be booked as connecting. Having stayed here about 10 times, my record of getting connecting rooms on Day 1 was (IIRC) 1 out of 5 when I booked direct and that was via the resort website. It is 4 out of 4 since Emyr started booking the same rooms for me because he knows the team here, has the number of the Director of Rooms and calls them in the morning of the day I arrive to double-check it is done (this is normal Emyr service, he’d do the same for you). Would I risk doing this via a total third party booking? No.

          • Geoggy says:
            1 Jan1 January 18:16

            Rob – you are a much more important customer to Emyr than the rest of us. I use him, but never get the feeling I get anything like the service you describe as normal. I have to do basic stuff like chase confirmations. If I could find another Virtuoso travel agent, I would.

          • Rob says:
            1 Jan1 January 18:31

            You’ll struggle to find a Virtuoso agent that doesn’t charge booking and/or amendment fees. Remember that if you book a £500 room via Emyr he only gets (after the HfP cut and assuming 20% VAT) £16.

            We spend £20k+ with him in a good year, irrespective of HfP reader volumes.

          • Geoggy says:
            1 Jan1 January 18:38

            This was c25k USD. . I spend most of my time feeling like an inconvenience.

      • Geek says:
        1 Jan1 January 13:44

        BA Holidays has a very limited choice of hotels – even in key destinations like NYC. Spending big chunks on some of their random hotels isn’t attractive to me.

        In addition I’m not sure the maths adds up—
        Old system – 5 nights in short haul Europe on a double tier point BA holiday = 160tp (25% of way to silver)
        New system – £1,875 per person of BAH spend to get 25% of way to silver.

        • tomahawk says:
          1 Jan1 January 13:55

          Whilst your numbers are correct, I was referring to short haul bookings in economy. For example last year I got 40 TP’s for a return trip to Corfu and 15 TP’s for a return trip to Dubrovnik. Those sort of numbers change the calculation entirely.

  • Louise says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:15

    The maths definitely aren’t in our favour.
    I earned 780 TPs this year, easily retaining Silver, under next year’s scheme the same flights would come in a little over 4000 TPs, falling well short.
    I need a new plan!

  • trevor says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:21

    Only a matter of time before BA quietly does away with soft landings. Probably be someone posting here discovering they are now a blue member of the Club.
    I’ve never achieved Gold but have enjoyed silver membership for well over a decade. I usually pay for business class but the silver benefits are appreciated on the couple of economy flights to Europe each year.

    Going forward I will not be confining my search parameters to the oneworld alliance when making flight purchases. I have no interest in directing my purchases to BA to achieve Bronze membership. I can just buy those things from LCC and pay less for my flight and fly from my regional airport instead of having to endure Heathrow.

  • Solartravels says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:25

    I hope this kicks KLM into action more to build on their generally excellent regional services to AMS. A KLM credit or even holidays offering in the UK would be the cherry on top. Their volumes through AMS and CDG from UK suggest a very strong loyalty

  • Cyril says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:32

    One question, I will be getting silver status for this collection year which finishes in March for me. Will I get to keep my silver status until April 26 or will it just be wiped soon as the new system goes live in April 25? Thanks

    • Rob says:
      1 Jan1 January 13:52

      Yes, it stays until April 2026. What is up for debate is whether you get Bronze to April 2027 or drop to Blue.

      • Tim S says:
        1 Jan1 January 14:13

        Anyone who achieves Silver to April 26, and then flies enough to actually use the perks they have earnt (and ordinarily expected to accrue enough TP to retain Silver) will almost certainly accrue enough TP to achieve Bronze to April 27 even under the new scheme.

        So I don’t see why lack of clarity in this is an issue.

        • Ken says:
          1 Jan1 January 14:24

          Surely many people might have 1 year when they might have got silver and subsequent year they might do 4 or 5 short haul trips in Y where their status is very useful (I’d say short haul business is a waste of money if you have status).

          The question of soft landings applies to Gold as well , where I’d guess the majority of leisure golds don’t qualify for Gold every single year.

          The lack of clarity is absolutely an issue.

        • Points Hound says:
          1 Jan1 January 14:33

          Really?! The lack of clarity is clearly an issue, looks at those that will be Gold till April 26 and are looking at either Silver or Blue. Big difference, which is currently unknown.

      • Tom says:
        1 Jan1 January 15:30

        It just seems to be a debate on this site, BA have confirmed to readers that there is no intention to terminate the current practice of soft landing to next lower tier.

        • Rob says:
          1 Jan1 January 16:51

          No, the debate is what the BA Twitter team is saying vs what a senior BA manager is posting on here.

          Note that no-one from BA has been in touch to correct what our article says, which is that they are going away.

  • Mike says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:37

    Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – what stage are you at?

    • George says:
      1 Jan1 January 13:46

      None of these. I fly with whoever is best for me at the time and I get my avios from credit card etc spend.

    • Aaron says:
      1 Jan1 January 14:02

      I keep jumping from bargaining to acceptance and back.

  • Lawrence says:
    1 Jan1 January 13:37

    So, my thoughts. When I book a flight I usually book business- purely for the blocked middle seat even in Europe. That bit of space makes a flight much more tolerable

    I am flying from outside London, so my flight will almost always be with a change.

    BA is usually sub-optimal an option, passing through Heathrow isn’t the best. The transfer times are usually not great. The price is usually 10-15% higher than a different carrier

    But, the level of sub-optimum is kind of even across the board, and made up for
    by bunching all my status / loyalty points together. I might not have the most convenient or cheapest flight, but it all averages out when you add the status bonus into the mix, especially as on a lot of trips, BA is the second best option, but all that “second best” adds up to a degree of loyalty

    Take away achievable status, and there is no advantage over, say lufthansa* or KLM

    *I have a weird perception of Lufthansa being somewhat bland, but I have no idea why

    It won’t STOP me using BA when the numbers work out, but it takes away a big draw when they are the second option

    • Throwawayname says:
      1 Jan1 January 13:45

      Lufthansa is super bland, but that’s a good thing, particularly for short haul- it means generally getting there on time, receiving your luggage relatively quickly and having a good chance of priority tags working, knowing what to expect from the lounges (and ensuring you eat there because you won’t be missing out on great onboard food!) and so on.

    • BrancasterLancaster says:
      1 Jan1 January 13:48

      +1

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