BA Holidays withholding tier points

[ricknye]

I have a cautionary tale to tell about earning tier points when booking through BA Holidays.

For a recent transatlantic business trip (LHR-ATL, PHI-LHR) I used BA Holidays to book flexible flights for both legs and a hotel for my stay in Philadelphia. Collectively this came to a 5 figure sum and I was expecting the 1 tier point per £ spent to apply. Before flying I had to postpone my trip for a week and amended the booking (the flights and the hotel) on the phone via a very helpful BA Holiday agent.

After coming back from my trip I noticed that I’d received 400 bonus tier points for both legs of my flight but nothing related to revenue spend. I phoned British Airways Executive Club quoting my booking reference and asked for this to be rectified which they said they would. Days later I received an email from the British Airways Club saying that BA Holidays “have confirmed that my booking reference did not meet the terms & conditions to qualify for BA Holiday tier points”.

I have scrutinised those Ts & Cs and am at a loss to discover my transgression. The only thing I can think of is having booked the flight + hotel at the same time, I then had to modify that booking by postponing both the flight and the hotel for a week. The upshot is that for the sake of an extra roughly 800 tier points that I would have earned from booking the hotel through BA Holidays, I am being denied more than 10,000 tier points which I’d have earned had I just booked the flight alone on BA.com. That seems pretty shabby treatment to me and also commercially short sighted: why would I ever use BA Holidays again after this?

I’m not sure what if anything I can do at this point. Is escalating my complaint worth it or even possible? I don’t know but I want to warn off others from making a similar mistake in the future.

[NorthernLass]

When you say you “booked through BA holidays”, exactly how did you do this? I’m not aware that flight elements of a true BAH are ever booked into a flexible category, which may be where things have gone wrong. How did you calculate the TPs you were expecting?