Household Account – any drawbacks?

[lucas01789]

I have 120,000 Avios in my BAEC account. My partner doesn’t have one at all. Before I sign her up and add create a Household Account, are there any potential drawbacks that I need to be aware of to creating a Household account? (fwiw, we don’t have any children or other relatives who are likely to use BA any time soon).

[NorthernLass]

Your bookings will use avios from both accounts pro-rata (when your partner has earned some), but it’s never caused any issues for us.

[Rob]

You can only redeem for people in the HHA or on your Friends & Family List. This isn’t a huge issue BUT you can only make changes to the F&F list every six months.

So … you decide to give your brother an Avios ticket, so you add him to the F&F list and issue it. No problem. The next week your partner decided to give their brother a free flight too. No can do, because of the need to wait six months before changing the F&F list again.

[memesweeper]

If you don’t have kids there’s very little point in a household account IMO. If you do have kids, you might only want one adult in the HHA, perhaps the adult earning the fewest Avios.

[Rui N.]

Why is there little point? It allows you to pool your avios. Unless both people in a couple have loads of them, that’s a significant benefit for almost anyone.
Furthermore, it also helpful for your extended family. Otherwise what would my parents and in-laws do with their few hundred avios?

[tiriavpo]

Rob Burgess wrote:

o … you decide to give your brother an Avios ticket, so you add him to the F&F list and issue it. No problem. The next week your partner decided to give their brother a free flight too. No can do, because of the need to wait six months before changing the F&F list again.

Are you sure that is still the case? I appear to be able to add more to my F&F list within 6 months of adding others. I think the limitation is that you cant remove someone within 6 months of adding them – so your example would be the case if your list was full and you needed to delete someone to free up space to add another.

HHA has served us well but it is a bit of a mess at the moment. Previously, any redemption would just deduct avios pro-rata – now, for every redemption I have made, I get the full amount of avios deducted from my account, then we get a ‘balancing payment’ from my partners account to mine.

[findmeinthetara]

This is slightly off topic, but very related. we’ve been part of a household account for years now & it works really well for us & the family members that are part of it. I’d highly recommend it…

Recently though we’ve made 2 UUA redemptions, one on a BA Holiday booking (one travelling passenger) & one flight only booking. Very odd this as historically any transactions of this nature are pro-rata’d across all member accounts, however for both the above UUA transactions the full amount of Avios have been taken solely from the member account travelling.

Anyone seen similar to this? The transaction shows in the BAEC account as a ‘manual adjustment’ debit…. Unsure as to whether it’s a mistake or this is the new norm, has been a while since we’ve done any UUA’s…. But seems to defeat the object of pooling the Avios points we all collect as a family….

[masaccio]

memesweeper wrote:

If you don’t have kids there’s very little point in a household account IMO. If you do have kids, you might only want one adult in the HHA, perhaps the adult earning the fewest Avios.

Not having enough status with Virgin to get a household account is a total PITA as my wife and I basically have to play games to try and keep our points balances as even as possible so that when we come to buy reward flights we can actually get 2 tickets.

Even for just the 2 of us the BAEC household account is a godsend.

[tiriavpo]

findmeinthetara wrote:

Anyone seen similar to this? The transaction shows in the BAEC account as a ‘manual adjustment’ debit…. Unsure as to whether it’s a mistake or this is the new norm, has been a while since we’ve done any UUA’s…. But seems to defeat the object of pooling the Avios points we all collect as a family….

Someone has – in the post immediately above yours! 😁

• This reply was modified 54 years, 4 months ago by .

[Matt]

Rob Burgess wrote:

You can only redeem for people in the HHA or on your Friends & Family List. This isn’t a huge issue BUT you can only make changes to the F&F list every six months.

So … you decide to give your brother an Avios ticket, so you add him to the F&F list and issue it. No problem. The next week your partner decided to give their brother a free flight too. No can do, because of the need to wait six months before changing the F&F list again.

You can only remove people from your account once every 6 months – I think once you’ve removed 1 person you’ve then got 24 hours to remove any others before the window shuts. You can add people at any time you have space in your F+F list.