Most airlines have already announced the measures they are taking to extend members status or reduce the tier points needed. BA have announced that they are writing to impacted Executive Club members to let them know that BA be lowering all Tier Point thresholds by 30% for all members due for renewal in April, May and June.
This means you will only need:
- Bronze 210 Tier points
- Silver 420 Tier points
- Gold 1050 Tier points
Also, for Gold Upgrade Vouchers and 2-4-1 Companion Vouchers (or Travel Together Tickets), earned through a British Airways Amex credit card, they are applying a six-month expiration extension to vouchers in members’ accounts.
You don’t need to do anything, this will happen automatically. You can view any existing vouchers in your account.
This applies to:
- Six month extension to unredeemed Gold Upgrade Vouchers and Companion Vouchers (or Travel Together Tickets), earned through a British Airways credit card.
- Six month extension to redeemed Gold Upgrade Vouchers and Companion Vouchers (or Travel Together Tickets), earned through a British Airways credit card, that were applied for travel from 1 March 2020 or thereafter.
- Six month extension to Companion Vouchers (or Travel Together Tickets), earned through a British Airways credit card due to trigger in next three months, up to 30 Jun 2020
I am yet to receive my email yet, but I believe that this also includes the Gold Guest List tier which requires a minimum of 3000 points for renewal and will now be 2100 Tier Points for people expiring in March, April and June 2020. It is not clear what applies at Concorde Room level yet.
I would expect BA to continue to makes concessions for tier point requirements for at least 6 months, but on a rolling basis. It’s not a particularly generous offer but as I have said before, I don’t blame them. BA need to protect and recover revenue for the foreseeable future so it makes sense to only give status to those who would have earned it anyway, rather than a blanket extension. However, if you had a couple of big tier point earning trips cancelled then you will probably not be very happy with the offer.
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I would have thought that if your confirmed bookings would have got you into the next tier up by your anniversary date, and then the flight(s) was / were cancelled by the UK Govt, Country to visit Govt or BA, then BA should honour your intentions and give you the level you would have got. for a year.
As usual I find this initiative by BA to be very weak in current situation, even reducing the TP requirements, this will not really help most as for example in my case, of year end in Feb next year, I had to already cancel some travel plans that would have been bringing in close to 50% of the normal requirements.
OTOH, I had already low expectation with the already poor customer service policies from both BA and EC. If they would have been lenient as Hilton Honors recently, that would have been a very customer gesture.
Cheers!
Hopefully it will roll forward for those of us that are just short of Silver or Gold renewal but due just after June concession. In my case 20 tier points required by early August!
What if you need the BA segments, but way passed the Silver (in my case) TP requirement?
I think you will need to speak to BA.
Meanwhile airlines and hotels worldwide are either simply awarding/ honouring status for an additional 12 months or dropping requirements by 50-75% for the next 12-18 months and BA, pretty much last in the game, come out with this frankly pathetic ‘offer’. I imagine a lot of time & resources went into quickly forming focus groups to come up with “Whats the absolute minimum we can get away with”. I find it incredibly short sighted if nothing else. Two types of companies will be made to suffer when we come out the other side of this. Those caught trying to profit off events and those who turned their noses up at customers loyalty.
I have £12k of BA holidays and flights remaining this year with a couple under my belt already. This amount would’ve comfortably seen me retain my Silver for another year by my December dead line. At present I see one of them possibly going ahead and that’s remote at best. As a self funding leisure traveller I worked damn hard to be able to book all those trips and threw it all BA’s way demonstrating considerable loyalty along the way. It’s a shame that they don’t feel loyalty goes both ways.
Of course with them being called out on on their apparent( although i’ll say ‘alleged’ myself) desire to watch the competition burn to the ground in a number of articles yesterday. I’m sure those groups probably factored in ‘less competition’ on their equations.
Why only those renewing in April, May and June? It seemingly makes sense, but it does not and it’s unfair. Surely everyone who had planned travelling travelling within the lockdown period and may already have acquired an indicative amount of points is affected. What if my tier year renews in July? How am that different to someone whose tier year renews in June? Would they be expecting me to make up all the difference in July, whereas for June renewal there’s no need? The discount should apply to everyone, as defined by a one year renewal window and not three months or there should be an equal extension for everyone to make up the points and that should be reviewed and updated depending on how long the lockdown lasts. I would be interested to know how they have thought this through.
I believe they will be doing the status allowances on a regular basis. I would expect them to increase the TP reduction percentage as time goes on as obviously people will have been affected more.
They can continue to tweak it with time, but my point was why not make the initial allowance for everyone, as everyone is already affected
As a Silver member of the British Airways Executive Club acquired entirely through my own financial resources I find British Airways response to the ongoing Covid 19 crisis to be mean spirited and pathetic. Since acquiring silver status I have been unable to fly and have no bookings to look forward to this year. I have yet to enjoy one single perk of silver status. Surely the right thing to do would be to give members a complimentary eighteen month extension of current status. I am hoping to do a lot of travelling in 2021 and going on British Airway’s current policy could end up starting next year with Bronze membership. Does loyalty count for anything ? Perhaps it’s time to switch my allegiance to another carrier !
I have applied for a voucher from BA on 16 March 2020 for several flights. The instructions on their site states that one should not cancel flights instead request a voucher online. Once you request the voucher, there is no email confirming your transaction; today I found out after calling the Gold executive line that my online request was never received; I can not prove I have requested a voucher on line as there is no email confirming it.
If you request online and don’t receive the voucher then it’s obviously worth chasing after a while. As they are being processed manually I’m guessing there could be human error.
so word on the street is, its all Tier earning benefits. So GUF2 and 2x GUF1 apply as well.
so in addition to Rust, Silver and Gold it continues as follows:
Gold Entry/Renewal at 1050
GUF2 at 1750TP
GGL Renewal at 2100
2xGUF1 at 2450
Concorde Card renewal/GGL entry at 3500
Joker at 4200
Joker or 2x GUF1 or 50k Avios at 4900
Joker or 2x GUF1 or 50k Avios at 5600
Joker or 2x GUF1 or 50k Avios at 6300
Useful thanks Lindsay!
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