American Express Membership Rewards - Help needed with upcoming BA flight

Hi, I'm an AmEx Centurion card holder, but not a member of BAs exec club. I just booked two club class tickets to San Diego in a couple of months time for my wife, myself and my 5 month old son. I requested the bassinet seats and was told that they couldn't be guaranteed. The implication was that they can request them but at any time up until check-in, if someone who is a silver/gold member of BA's exec club requests them then they would have priority. So my question is: is there any way I can ensure these seats are pre-allocated to me? If not, is there a process by which I can get automatic upgarde to BA's highest level of membership (they said no on the phone but you may know different)? And if I get BA/AmEx's Premium Plus card (available at no annual fee to Centurion memebrs) will that have any kind of influence at check-in (maybe I can transfer MR points to the card and convert them into BA miles)? Hope this is clear - obviously I don't want to have paid over £6K for club tickets to have to hold our little guy for 10 hours (delightful though he is)! The other option is to poke him with a sharp stick just prior to take-off and hope that the screams force them to upgrade us to 1st! I have around 200,000 MR points just hanging around if that is useful info. Thanks in advance - I didn't really know where else to turn, and hope this is the right board for this query.

Vladimir

BA don't offer to match or freely upgrade you to any Silver, Gold or whatever status. You should however get in at the Blue level now to take advantage of your San Diego club class fare.

They're dropping First Class on that route, so may well be no F when you travel anyway.

I don't think a Premier Plus card, miles in your account, or anything else of that ilk will help.

Try the BA board by the way - you'll be better placed that this Amex board for a BA-related answer. There's a few BA employees there.

Worth trying Centurion travel if you haven't already, just in case they can put a good word in for you.

Sorry couldn't be of more help.

Check your reservation on the appropriate booking engine www.checkmytrip.com (http://www.checkmytrip.com) or www.viewtrip.com (http://www.viewtrip.com) . Make sure they have actually assigned you the seats you want. If they have all of you shoudl join the EC quickly and 'associate' you booking with your EC card accounts - just call and ask the reservation staff to add them to the booking. Then exactly 24 hours before departure use online checking www.ba.com/checkin (http://www.ba.com/checkin) . The seats are then 99.9% certain to be yours.

If the seats you want are not showing as pre-assiged, look at the seat map and see if they are avilable, if they are showing as available just call reservations and ask for the seats to be assigned to you (do not mention the basinet at all). If they refuse just keep trying until they do it!

The relationship between BA and AMEX is not the best one, and there is nothing AMEX Travel (of any flavour) can really do to help. The Amex www.itn.net (http://www.itn.net) search engine does not even list BA flights anymore.

vladimir,

You've had advice from Merry himself...there is no better for BA help!

...and I'm extremely grateful to hear from the big cheese himself! Have taken his advice and will hope for the best.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Merry:
.... Then exactly 24 hours before departure use online checking www.ba.com/checkin (http://www.ba.com/checkin) . The seats are then 99.9% certain to be yours.....
</font>
Merry:
Nice to hear from you again. I always liked your postings a lot, at least most of them ... some "fishy" ones, I don't know..
Regarding online check-in, it didn't work well for me. MIA-LHR I did it 11h 59min before check-in and it worked fine! LHR-MIA, wanted to do the same. Didn't work out! Screen came always back to the question "BOARDING AIRPORT?" or so. Customer service had the same problem. And I could not find the phone-# for the Internet help line.

Erased some missplaced HTML...

[This message has been edited by USAFAN (edited 06-07-2003).]