How should you time promotion to British Airways Executive Club Silver status to maximise benefits?

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• tom1 says:

  22 Aug22 August 17:15

  I’ve booked a Premium Economy flight and UUA to business class.
  I understand you get the tier points and Avios of the original booking class.

  I assume that the club Europe route, because doesn’t have premium economy, will only earn 5-10 tier points of economy in this case?

  • Save East Coast Rewards says:

    22 Aug22 August 19:27

    Yes however you may hit lucky and get the business class TP on all flights. If you do please do not mention anything. For example if you’re missing the last 40 TP but got club TP for each other leg then don’t try and claim the remaining leg as you’ll be worse off if they then correct it.

    But in theory you should earn PE TP on the long haul legs and what you’ll earn on the short haul connections depends what fare buckets you book into. Economy can be up to 20 TP on the shorter routes.

• TimM says:

  22 Aug22 August 19:40

  HfP is always running ‘how much is an Avios’ worth articles and comments within articles. However, how much is a tier point worth?

  This article seems to supply the tier-point junkies who may be prepared to pay £900+ on unnecessary flights in order to obtain ‘status’ without comparing the cost of the similar benefits of said status commercially. One can pay for seat selection, if there is any benefit, and for lounge access, fast track etc.. What is the true value of ‘status’ and what is the break-even point in terms of wanted flights vs. points run flights?

  • Save East Coast Rewards says:

    22 Aug22 August 19:50

    That is a good point. Personally all the flights I take are because I enjoy them, although I’ll often take a longer routing to get more points.

    The value proposition is really hard though. If you spend £900 to reach silver but hated every moment of these flights then unless you think your time as no value then the ‘cost’ is over £900. But if you enjoyed the flights then you might have considered it worth it.

    Then you add the costs of any hotels, travel to the airport, etc. The hotel stays might also help keep your status in a hotel chain but it’s an additional cost

  • mr_jetlag says:

    22 Aug22 August 21:41

    You have to love the journey to do a TP run. I accept I’m a little weird for getting excited at the prospect of 1020TP runs to Phoenix. I doubt anyone who’s booking 160TP b2b SOF flights hates them, you have to take the flight after all. It’s not like a mattress run night where you don’t have to actually sleep in the hotel.

  • Memesweeper says:

    22 Aug22 August 22:22

    If you fly regularly on BA/oneworld in economy for work then Silver is very handy. Certainty worth making the effort to pay for a few club upgrades to maintain status.

    Flying multi-city across the states to B2B in Hawaii just for status…? that makes no sense to me even if I’m commuting on BA every week.

  • Rob says:

    22 Aug22 August 22:50

    Fair point, but the article is really about 3 x weekend breaks (which it would need to be on most routes to get the cheap CE pricing) so it’s not like you’re paying £900 in cash and getting status.

    As with spending £700 on a pair of Louis Vuitton trainers, there is also a status element to, well, having status which exceeds simple financial logic.

  • John says:

    23 Aug23 August 05:43

    There is a difference between a pure TP run and a “semi-TP run”

    In a pure TP run you don’t actually want to go anywhere, you do back-to-back flights or stay at the airport hotel and do nothing except moan about how it is a colossal waste of time.

    I’ve never done a pure TP run, only “semi-TP runs” as I always have some sort of reason to go to the destination even if it’s something like “looking at an interesting statue in person”.

    Or to put it another way there are some simple things on my bucket list that might only take a few minutes. Ordinarily it’s not worthwhile to spend £200 and 2 days going there in economy or on Norwegian or whatever. However if there is a TP run available then I can justify it.

    If I actually want to spend a few days there that’s even better, the cost of the TPs is more or less £0, or in some cases negative for example ex-EU flights. Nobody would do ex-EU just for the TPs if they weren’t also significantly cheaper than going directly from your actual origin.

    If you would have paid the cost of business directly, the TPs have a negative cost, otherwise the TPs cost the difference between the flights you would have taken had there been no ex-EU deal (in my case it would often be the economy or PE direct flight).

    Referring to the LV shoes example – if you already have shoes you are happy with, then yes the £700 is a waste of money, but if you actually need new shoes then you are spending £100 on shoes and £600 on the status factor. I think I’ve only ever taken a completely unnecessary flight once (needed a 4th BA segment so instead of Asia to UK I went Asia to mainland Europe to UK and didn’t leave the airport).

• Niall says:

  22 Aug22 August 22:30

  What ever happened with the ambiguous wording on the reduced tier point requirements. I see the original article said for those who have a tier point collection year ending 8 June (as wording said before 30 June) and there was some confusion in comments. I assumed with my 8 July 2022 end I would not qualify, but in my account it shows 450 tier points needed to retain Silver. Was there an update on this I missed?

  • Niall says:

    22 Aug22 August 22:33

    Sorry, should have read previously. Looks like this took Rob by surprise also (and people on other forums), hopefully we’ll get a confirmation of reduced threshold for status ending after 8 June 2022.

• ShawnR says:

  23 Aug23 August 12:28

  Keen on advice for (an expanding) family:

  My wife’s BAEC (Gold) year-end date is 8 Aug ’22. Our son was born Apr ’21, but still not added to BAEC Household Account (currently just on Friends & Family, i.e. no BAEC Membership Number yet)

  Should my wife try to fly before Jun ’22 (to benefit from the lower TP thresholds) and then apply for her BAEC account to be frozen for maternity from Aug ’22? Or wait until Aug’22 for heavy travel and freeze the account once travel complete?

  Also, is it fine to apply for the maternity freeze when the baby’s over a year old? Nothing seems to contradict that in the Ts&Cs

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