British Airways to pay 2.2 BILLION Avios points to settle a US Class Action lawsuit settlement

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• Redhroogar says:

  2 Jun2 June 09:04

  I guess that this doesn’t apply to Avios upgrade redemptions??

  • Nick says:

    2 Jun2 June 09:41

    It depends. Did you pay a ‘fuel surcharge’ at the time? All the info you need is in the article – it’s not the type of redemption you made but what you were asked to pay!!

• Gus Paul says:

  2 Jun2 June 09:39

  So I was living in US for that period and registered to a US address. When I moved back to the UK 3 years ago I had BAEC merge that account with my exisiting UK account. I kept the US account number. I hope I qualify although I haven’t seen an email.

  • Gus Paul says:

    2 Jun2 June 09:49

    So I did get an email after all. 20,000 avios or $469.69

    • Rob says:

      2 Jun2 June 10:20

      I would take the cash!

      • Gus Paul says:

        2 Jun2 June 17:40

        Don’t have a US bank account any more so not sure how that would work

      • Lady London says:

        2 Jun2 June 18:00

        Paypal or one of the virtual cards that is available in a foreign currency would do the trick.

      • Lyn says:

        2 Jun2 June 18:36

        Yes, cash sounds better in your case.

        It is now live, even though not June 3rd yet. I would have thought you just had to put in your BAEC number to check, but no, you have to have received an e-mail (based on info provided by BA) with a unique number.

        My husband has been offered 35,000 avios or $114.65. Which probably shows the difference between economy and business fuel surcharges. We’ve sometimes booked one-ways for him for flexibility in timing, and on BA because they were the only non-stop flights, so his BA economy redemptions have in fact been useful over the years even though they are not normally considered good value.

• Lady London says:

  2 Jun2 June 18:00

  Paypal or one of the virtual cards that is available in a foreign currency would do the trick.

  • Adam says:

    4 Jun4 June 09:18

    My take is they devalue and wipe out fuel surcharges to counteract any further chance of court action elsewhere

• StewartR says:

  4 Jun4 June 11:23

  @Rob

  Any chance you could run an article looking back last, say, last 15 years – timeline, devaluation point, devaluation %. Would be nice to be able to infer an annual rate of inflation, irrespective of whether or not a valuation took place in that particular year, over a longer period of time. Graph with a line down the middle?

  I’d love to know how the rate of point inflation is growing over time – increasing, decreasing, staying the same (exponentially growing?).

  Lots of great points about “earn & burn”, “its another currency” on this thread. Difficult to justify without quantitative idea of the rate of inflation though.

  Critical point here probably is that you can’t “invest” your stash i.e. you can’t protect your stash from the rate of inflation of the currency. Don’t know how much trouble you are in though … if you don’t know how quickly its evaporating.

  • Rob says:

    4 Jun4 June 12:47

    No 🙂

    What I would say is that it isn’t linear. Go back 15 years and there was no BA Amex 2-4-1 voucher. That was a major game changer. There was also no Qatar Airways in oneworld, no airberlin (admittedly gone now), no SriLankan, no Flybe etc.

    More importantly, you are generally getting a better product. Not on BA, of course, since it is the same rubbish seat!, but redeem for Qatar’s Qsuite and you’re getting a business class product which is light years ahead of what was about 15 years ago.

    Go back 20 years and you have NO flat beds in business – on any airline – and no Amex 2-4-1. There was no oneworld either, so you were only redeeming on BA in the main. More importantly, you were only EARNING on BA. Even if Business Class to New York was, say, 60000 BA Miles at the time it was (overall) a poorer deal than using 120,000 now on a peak date but using a 2-4-1 and getting a flat bed.

    But of course we had Concorde 20 years ago which was, I think, 100,000 BA Miles ….

• StewartR says:

  5 Jun5 June 09:08

  Ah … I see your point. Relatively easy to get devaluation points perhaps, but difficult to quantify change in product and, I imagine, difficult to pin down when costs of redemption’s increased.

  Fair dos.

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