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TUESDAY UPDATE: The great IAG Loyalty Avios migration ….

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UPDATE TUESDAY: It is now possible to log in from the desktop home page. To be fair, quite a bit is now working, but not everything.

I cannot see a transaction list in the iOS app. You cannot move Avios to/from Iberia. American Airlines redemptions are missing. If you have a household account, ‘My Household Account’ claims that you do not. There is likely to be more out there ….

UPDATE MONDAY PM: The Executive Club website now says:

‘It’s taking us a little longer than expected to get access to all parts of the Executive Club back up and running. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and we’re working as hard as we can to make all the features of your account available soon.’

Of course, most people still cannot log-in via desktop and so cannot see this message …..

Avios wing 14

UPDATE MONDAY: No news, which probably isn’t good news. People who are managing to log in, mainly via the app or the trick below, are occasionally able to make redemption bookings although others report the site falling over at the payment stage. American Airlines redemption availability seems to have gone missing. Some people are reporting that recent flights taken are showing on their accounts, others are not.

UPDATE SUNDAY: We have no new news, either officially or unofficially. The BA Twitter feed was promising people on Saturday that normal service would resume on Monday morning, but there has been a change of tone in recent hours and Monday is no longer being mentioned.

UPDATE SATURDAY: You CAN log in to ba.com on a desktop device as long as you don’t do it from the home page where the ‘log in’ button is greyed out. If you do a dummy cash flight booking, you’ll find that the log in button DOES work on the ‘flight selection’ page.

Whilst BA recommends you use the app, the iOS version appears to be having severe issues. It cannot even pull up a list of transactions, even though the desktop site can do it.

According to Flyertalk reports, if you have an ampersand (‘&’ sign) in your password it will no longer work and must be reset.

Functionality remains limited although you can make Avios bookings. The call centre appears to have less ability to book and amend tickets.

There is no published timeline for when full functionality will be restored.

(If you work in IT, posts 509 and 515 of this Flyertalk thread give some examples how bloated and slow ba.com is, in terms of the number of requests and data which are sent in both directions for even the simplest requests.)

UPDATE FRIDAY PM: You might not be able to use the ‘log in’ button on ba.com, but BA assures us that:

“Members can access their Executive Club account using the BA app, and they can part pay with Avios when you make a booking on ba.com. We’re aware that access through ‘log in’ on ba.com is unavailable at the moment.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience this is causing, for now, we hope these options available will help members access their account.“

Despite this statement, many readers are telling us that it is not true. Your mileage may vary.

UPDATE FRIDAY AM: Executive Club and Avios functionality is now back! (or perhaps not)

British Airways confirms:

“Planned improvements to Executive Club took a little longer than expected, members can now access their Executive Club account through the BA app and ba.com.“

The link to ba.com is here.

Below is the article as it ran on Friday morning.

Just to save you sending us another email or tweet, we have no idea when Avios functionality will fully return to ba.com.

Having spent the day yesterday at Loyalty Summit with a lot of IAG and Comarch (the software company involved in the data transfer) staff, I can tell you that they don’t know either.

A quick reminder, access to your Avios account was due to be restored late evening on 16th November.

The work is to allow for the migration of all loyalty databases to IAG Loyalty and its new Global Loyalty Platform, which is the first stage in a broader reshaping of how Avios works across the various IAG airlines.

In simple terms, all of your existing data is being shoe-horned into a totally new database, with all existing data items having to be slotted into different slots, and then IAG crossing its fingers to see if the output you see actually works.

Certain functionality seems to be restored this morning in the app albeit not on the website. Some people can log in and book redemptions by using a bizarre workaround (try to book a cash ticket and when you get to the page with the flight results, click log-in at the top right – suddenly you get full access to your account and can book).

For anyone looking to grab Avios seats for next November, I have some bad news. Whilst BAEC members have been unable to book for the last few days, Avios seats have still been bookable by members of other oneworld frequent flyer programmes. Even if you are the first person on the phone when booking restarts, the flights you wanted may not be there. The upside is that many schemes, eg American Airlines, only allow booking 330 days in advance vs 355 days for BA, so those members cannot access newly released BA seats.

How to earn Avios points from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (December 2021)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways BA Amex American Express card

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up, no annual fee and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending ….. Read our full review

British Airways BA Premium Plus American Express Amex credit card

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the UK’s most valuable credit card perk – the 2-4-1 companion voucher Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points, such as:

Nectar American Express

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & two airport lounge passes Read our full review

American Express Platinum card Amex

The Platinum Card from American Express

30,000 points and an unbeatable set of travel benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital On Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios:

Capital On Tap Business Rewards Visa

The most generous Avios Visa or Mastercard for a limited company Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus:

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express card

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

(Want to earn more Avios?  Click here to visit our home page for our latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios this month from offers and promotions.)

Category

British Airways and Avios

Comments (218)

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

  • RussellH says:
    21 Nov21 November 11:32

    I could log-in yesterday using Win 7 / Pale Moon, but this morning there is just a message:-
    The Executive Club is temporarily unavailable while we make some planned improvements. We’re working hard to get everything back up and running as soon as possible.
    Hmmmm…..

  • BenC says:
    21 Nov21 November 12:27

    Have they given any indication on when tier points from recent flights will post across?

    I’m due for promotion to Silver, but not sure whether just to wait or whether making a claim might be beneficial.

    • Distichon says:
      22 Nov22 November 08:49

      I’d be quite interested in that, too. I took both in and out during the downtime, on a BA holiday booking for double tier points no less. The flight on Friday had posted by now, giving me the impression that by then, indeed some parts of their backend worked again. The Sunday flight is still missing, though. Somehow expect this will end up with a call, but then I at least can ask for the double points at the same time…

      • BenC says:
        22 Nov22 November 10:15

        Update: I took flights on the 12th and 13th November – and both posted to my account yesterday afternoon. I’m assuming there is a batch process ongoing to credit accounts.

  • Paul says:
    21 Nov21 November 13:08

    What a total mess. As a software engineer their website & systems are just totally shambolic. This is the result of penny pinching and offshoring dev. It really does not pay in the end! Spend the money, get a good team of on-shore devs and and sort it out once and for all.

    • Hulk says:
      21 Nov21 November 17:35

      No can do anything as well as the English.

    • Phil W says:
      22 Nov22 November 08:03

      I’ve had plenty of great experiences using off-shore Dev. The quality of Dev outputs is almost completely correlated to the ability of the client to accurately define the outcomes they want at the definition stage and the ability of the client to purposefully manage the wider project.

      Blaming off-shore dev is lazy and jingoistic.

      • Sam says:
        22 Nov22 November 09:21

        I agree with Phil and speak from experience running teams in multiple geographies.

        Ultimately, it’s down to much the firm want to spend. There will be a wider team, not just devs or testers. This feels like something a bit more serious than bugs and there was some penny pinching during integration/change planning

    • Niall says:
      22 Nov22 November 14:17

      People do often jump to blame off shore development without knowledge of what’s happened. As others have said though, offshore dev teams can be very effective.

      However, I don’t know, maybe Paul does have knowledge of what has actually gone wrong at BA.

      An offshore development team can often be a problem. Saying that is not suggesting that offshore development teams can’t be every bit as good or better than U.K. teams. But there are a lot of organisations having a lot of issues as a result of offshoring development. A variety of reasons can contribute to the problem like:
      – Getting rid of the onshore team that ho had the specific system knowledge and experience.
      – Expectations of savings leading to pushing budgets down based on high level estimates.
      – Offshored / outsourced development may go through different management. For example, I have seen teams move from U.K. developers who report directly to U.K. project managers/sponsors vs offshore staff who do not report directly to those U.K. sponsors and don’t feel answerable to them.
      – The growth of development in some countries I think has resulted in a lot of people turning their hand to development. Your new team may very well have a lot less experience than your U.K. team.

      I’ll stop now, but wanted to add some balance. Shouldn’t jump to blame offshoring development, but I don’t think it is wrong to blame this if it has been a factor!

      • Luke says:
        22 Nov22 November 15:08

        The big question is would anyone use offshoring if it wasn’t cheaper?

        To me it seems to lead inevitably to greater complexity and risk.

        • Sam says:
          23 Nov23 November 10:04

          Why so you think it leads to greater complexity and risk?

          If you have the right oversight, there is no difference and the firm will benefit from reduced overheads and for us as customers, hopefully cheaper fares, better products from investment etc etc

  • Yorkieflyer says:
    21 Nov21 November 18:42

    Well I can log in by the back door but Avios bookings fail at the payment stage

  • AndyS says:
    21 Nov21 November 19:59

    During the outage my BA amex posted Avios to BA. These have left Amex but are not showing on Ba. Will they eventually appear of have they been lost? If so who to contact, Amex or BA ?

    • AJA says:
      21 Nov21 November 20:20

      I think you have to just wait and give it time. If they don’t post I’d go back to Amex and get proof from them of them sending the points to BAEC.

      I’m in a similar position, I stupidly initiated a transfer of e-rewards points worth 2000 Avios on Friday evening when I saw reports that people were able to access BAEC. Then I read the SNAFU on Saturday morning. It usually takes a week to process so let’s see if they post. I do at least have an email trail in my case.

      • Rich says:
        22 Nov22 November 04:39

        TPs / Avios for flight taken last Tuesday night posted overnight. Things are moving, it’s just a waiting game.

    • NvT1115 says:
      22 Nov22 November 09:11

      In the same boat here – it’s a waiting game…

  • ACK says:
    21 Nov21 November 22:33

    Called Sun afternoon to add an infant to a 241 redemption booking. Avios payment successfully taken by agent, the only thing she wasn’t able to do is get an accurate tax amount to pay. But I guess this isn’t related to BAEC, so I’d say the BAEC part was working.

  • ChasP says:
    21 Nov21 November 22:45

    well we all Knew it would be a shambles and suspect a majority expected at least a week to sort out

    HFP should have run a competition to guess how long it would take

    • Cats are best says:
      22 Nov22 November 09:13

      There’s still plenty of time to do it 🙂

    • Lady London says:
      22 Nov22 November 11:09

      Nah. Even when it comes back they’ll be fixing the problems left for 1 to 3 years. We’d never be able to know which person to give the sweepstake prize to. As we’d never get a specific end date.

  • Hardpack says:
    22 Nov22 November 09:56

    I was able to book and pay for a reward flight saver yesterday afternoon, and was also able to book a multi sector return trip on ba and Iberia yesterday via the call centre, although when it came to ticketing, that didn’t work straight away and had to have some manual intervention but was sorted within 20 mins.

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

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