British Airways has just announced the long-expected change to its loyalty programme, moving from Tier Points that were based on the class of ticket and length of flight, to one based solely on revenue. £1 of spend gives you 1 Tier Point (excluding airport taxes).
With this, of course, the number of tier points you need to progress through the tiers has also changed. Bronze (“rust”) used to be 300 Tier Points. Now it will be 3,500. Silver used to need 600, now it will be 7,500. Gold used to be 1,500, now it will require 20,000 (i.e. £20,000 of spend with the airline).
If you’ve complained about BA lounges being busy in the past, I suspect that over the next year they will start to get a lot quieter!
I originally managed to get Silver via a status match when British Midland was taken over, and just about squeezed renewal for a few years until the pandemic hit and travel was cut back in my personal life too (no more Tier Point runs to Oakland or Malta).
I reckon my average European return flight with BA is about £300. I haven’t got the exact figures, but lets assume about £250 of that counts towards status (edit: a dummy booking for a return to Madrid is coming in at ~£270, of which only £188 would be eligible for Tier Points in the new system, so that assumption is ‘generous’). That’s 14 return flights for Bronze, or 30 for Silver.
Previously, each short-haul flight earned 20 Tier Points, 40 for a return, so you could get bronze with 8 return flights and silver with 15. In other words, the thresholds have just about doubled for economy passengers.
Since I moved to Manchester, flying with BA has become less convenient — there are no international flights direct from the airport, so there’s an unattractive change at Heathrow involved. I’m finding SAS, AFKL, or LH much more useful. However, setting tier point levels that are unachievable doesn’t appear to aim to engender loyalty. It’s a little ironic that along with these changes the name has also changed from the Executive Club to The British Airways Club when it appears to be catering far more for the well-heeled business traveller.
