Avios bits: Club Iberia Plus renamed, tier points, NatWest BA cashback

Three bits of BA and Avios related news:

Club Iberia Plus renamed after eight weeks

Of all the things I thought we may see backsliding on after the 1st April IAG loyalty changes, the one I didn’t expect was a rebranding at Iberia.

However, the powers that be have decided that Club Iberia Plus – the new name for Iberia Plus – made no sense.

The scheme has now been rebranded as ‘Iberia Club’.

Given how long rebrandings tend to take, this is quite an impressive turnaround given that its only eight weeks since Club Iberia Plus launched.

It’s goodbye to this:

and hello to:

The new British Airways tier point system in action

I saw this image on LinkedIn yesterday and thought it was worth sharing, for anyone who hasn’t taken a British Airways long haul economy flight recently.

This is from a start-up founder who travels between London and New York regularly – but only in discounted economy, because his company is still in start-up mode.

His trips used to get him to Gold, hence the Gold tint to the statement.

This is what he got from his last trip (click to enlarge):

Yes, 24 Avios and 3 tier points for this one way flight.

This means that he will need to fly between Heathrow and JFK over 3,300 times, return, this year in order to earn 20,000 tier points to retain his Gold card. That’s tricky.

You can argue whether BA should care if someone taking 12-15 return flights to New York in economy each year is worth keeping as a customer, but this particular one is – unsurprisingly – leaving in search of status elsewhere.

£100 British Airways cashback for NatWest cardholders

NatWest has been running a British Airways cashback deal for its Mastercard credit card holders (debit cards seem to be accepted too) for the last few weeks, although we’ve only just seen it.

There are two offers:

• you will earn £100 cashback on £500 of BA flight spend to ‘a non-UK or EU destination’, booked by 30th June

• you will receive an additional 5% cashback (up to £100) on ANY OVERSEAS SPEND in ‘a non-UK or EU destination’ by 31st October

There are a couple of quirks here:

• you must register in advance via this page and, more importantly, you must register at least 48 hours before making your booking

• the website is talking complete nonsense when it says ‘you get £100 cashback on flight bookings to non-EU destinations’. There are PLENTY of non-EU destinations excluded in the small print if you dig deep enough, for example Norway and Switzerland. Mastercard is going to be getting a lot of complaints ….

• you qualify for the 5% cashback on general foreign spending even if you don’t trigger the British Airways element of the cashback

You can find out more on the Priceless website here.

Thanks to Zakir for this.