BA Holidays won’t honour tier point spend

[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.

[Skywalker]

ricknye wrote:

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

You need to contact BA Holidays directly (not via BAC) and ask them what specifically it was about your booking that did not meet the Ts & Cs, because that clarity appears to be missing in your post above.

There are some email addresses listed in this post which should be direct contacts for BAH, however that post was from 2022, so I do not know how current the email addresses are.

I have found BAH to be very helpful and very knowledgeable, so will hopefully they will shed some light on this for you.

[AJA]

Something doesn’t add up here. A few questions though.

1 Are you sure you haven’t fallen foul of this:
British Airways Holidays tier points awards do not apply to any British Airways flight bookings where the hotel or car is added to a booking in a ‘Shopping Basket’ with individually priced flight and hotel and/or car components or when added in Manage my Booking after the flight has been booked.

Also

2 When did you first make the booking and was it for flights after 1 April 2025? the BAH TP only applies for trips after that date.
3 Did you pay anything to amend the booking?
4 How long since you’ve returned from the trip? Tp are supposed to be applied 14 days after travel is completed
5 Did you fly on BA metal and on BA flight numbers?
6 Was this in CW?
7 Did you register for the bonus TP offer?
Sounds like you’ve been awarded the bonus TP for the flights but not received anything for the flights.

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

How was this actually booked?

Did you select the flight only option and then add the hotel at the end or did you use the ‘flights + hotel’ option from the get go.

The former doesn’t count as a BA Hol for the calculation of nTPs based on the entire cost of the trip and only the flight element.

[SwiftUberGeek]

I have had a very similar issue. I had 2 passengers on my BAH booking. I had to change the flights so I spoke to the GGL team to get them to do it. They didn’t have 2 of the same classes for the new flight so split the booking and change the flights for the 2 separate bookings. I was explicitly clear on the call to ask if this would affect the tier points and assured it would all be fine.

After I got back I got the bonus tier points but nothing else. I complained twice, and finally after 6 weeks got the exact same stock response as you with no further explanation. TBH at this point I don’t even mind if I just get the normal nTPs for the flights only but to get nothing is totally outrageous.

I have complained again to the GGL team and asked them to escalate it but they said all they can do is submit a claim to BAH again. Strangly I did get the nTPs for an internal US Alaska flight on the same booking post a couple of days ago but still nothing for the BA flights.

Has anyone else that has had this issue managed to get the tier points added?

[JDB]

@SwiftUberGeek – it’s odd that the GGL team agreed to amend a BAH booking unless they were simply acting as a go-between. If they did, it suggests that your trip perhaps wasn’t a compliant BAH?

[SwiftUberGeek]

I have booked BAH via GGL loads of times with no issues before. The booking was deffo BAH on the confirmation etc even after the changes. If it wasn’t BAH then surely the nTPs would have just posted for flights anyway? Like ricknye I cannot see anything in the T&Cs to explain why it isn’t valid and for BA to not give any further detail is just crazy.