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British Airways launched a Triple Avios promotion last week, but what should have been a simple enough promotion to understand, turned out to be confusing and contradictory. The blame for the mess lies squarely at the feet of whoever drafted the promotion details and whoever gave the go ahead to post those details to the British Airways website.
I’m going to ignore the fact that there were versions of the promotion details that were written so poorly that a lot of Executive Club members (including me) thought that the promotion was only for transatlantic travel (it isn’t – it’s for all BA flights). I’m just going to focus on why, for a lot of travelers, what BA is telling them about how many Avios they will earn is wrong.
Let me explain.
The promotion is called the “Global Triple Avios offer” and the first sentence of the promotion page reads “You can now earn TRIPLE Avios in our Global Avios offer“…which sounds pretty self-explanatory until you read the rest of the opening paragraph (emphasis is mine):
You can now earn TRIPLE Avios in our Global Avios offer. So whether you are saving for a reward flight or need some extra Avios to help pay for your next city break, British Airways are making it a whole lot easier for you to earn the Avios you need.
To earn Triple Avios all you need to do is register, book and travel on up to 4 return flights before 11 December 2016 and we’ll reward you with triple Avios.
With this offer you will earn Triple Avios on all British Airways flights. You will also earn Triple Avios when you fly with our partners American Airlines, Finnair and Iberia on flights between Europe and North America. The bonus Avios will be awarded before any cabin or tier bonuses on all tickets except reward flights.
This is a global offer available to all of our Executive Club Members who wish to travel during this period.
Right, so it’s not really a simple “Triple Avios” promotion…it’s an “Triple Avios on some of the Avios you earn” promotion.
A little further down the promotion page is this paragraph……
……and BAEC members should pay particular attention to the words I’ve highlighted (which were not there when the promotion launched).
The “calculate now” link that British Airways has supplied leads straight to the Avios flight calculator page and, if you take the airline at its word and enter your flight details into the calculator…..
…you get a set of results that looks a bit like this:
Nowhere does British Airways split out what “base Avios” are so, if you’re traveling in a premium cabin and if you take the airline at its word and “Simply input your flight details into the calculator to see what you would normally earn and then multiply that by 3 to see what you could get on all BA flights“….you’d get a number that’s wrong.
The reason why the number is wrong is because the Avios figure that the calculator spits out includes a bonus for booking in a premium cabin…and that shouldn’t be included if only “base Avios” count.
You can see what the “cabin bonus” is for each fare above Y, B & H (for the London – Los Angeles route) in the table above:
- E & T fares get no cabin bonus (5,442 – 5,442)
- W fares get a cabin bonus of 2,721 Avios (8,163 – 5,442)
- R & I fares get a cabin bonus of 2,721 Avios (8,163 – 5,442)
- J, C & D fares get a cabin bonus of 8,163 Avios (13,605 – 5,442)
- A fares get a cabin bonus of 8,163 Avios (13,605 – 5,442)
- F fares get a cabin bonus of 10,884 Avios (16,326 – 5,442)
And none of those should be included when calculating how many bonus Avios are earned in this promotion.
In the one paragraph British Airways says:
- Passengers should triple whatever number the calculator gives them…. but also says
- Only base Avios count (despite the fact that we know that the calculator doesn’t show just base Avios).
I picked up on this in the terms & conditions when I posted about the promotion last week:
[T]here’s a line in the T&Cs which I don’t fully understand and it’s the one that reads “Eligible Participants will receive triple Avios Points before any cabin or tier bonuses on all tickets except reward flights”
I understand the bit about the triple Avios being calculated before any tier bonuses are applied….but the way the BA calculator shows how many Avios you’ll earn takes into account the fare class booked and therefore also the cabin of travel….so what cabin bonuses are excluded from the promotion?
I contacted British Airways via their Twitter account almost as soon as I’d noticed that line in the terms and conditions and I asked them to explain:
The reply (a day later) just directed me back to the Avios calculator!
(name blanked out as I have no interest in getting anyone into trouble)
I tried again:
I didn’t hear anything back so I decided to stop using Direct Messages and took to the open Twitter forum instead. This time I thought I’d try a different approach:
I worked how how many Avios I thought the promotion would give (which I now realise is wrong…but that’s another matter) and wanted to see what they’d say.
I didn’t get a tweet back, instead I got another DM the next day:
So the answer is that they don’t actually know.
I’m still waiting for a reply from the BAEC (who are probably horribly overworked right now).
It actually gets a bit more embarrassing for the airline….
British Airways Changed The Promotion page….But It’s Still Wrong!
British Airways knows that it has an issue with this promotion because the promotion page and the T&Cs are on about the fourth re-write right now…..unfortunately for BA flyers the main page is still wrong.
This is what it shows:
Oh dear.
How has British Airways not realised and understood that the Avios calculator is going to give the wrong answer to a lot of flyers who will be making the most of this promotion? (flyers in premium cabins)
How can an airline release a promotion that, quite clearly, a large proportion of its employees don’t understand? Has BA cost-cutting got to the stage of not teaching their staff about their own product?
Hopefully anyone reading this post now knows that there’s a little bit more to working out your Base Avios (if you’re booked into a premium cabin) than just clicking through to the Avios calculator so, if you bump into anyone from BA, be sure to pass this on as they don’t appear to have a clue.
