Well, we finally get down to the business of actually earning miles!
First off, you need to actually work out how long a trip you’re travelling on. A great tool for determining the distances between two points is this website:
http://gc.kls2.com
The distances aren’t exactly what BA use, but they are pretty accurate.
BA are pretty stingy with miles if you’re not travelling on a Y B H fare or higher. In fact, anything less than that (i.e. most cheap economy tickets), only earn 25% of the total miles (subject to a minimum award of 125). That means if you’re on a flight that’s 1000 miles, you’ll only get 250 miles credited.
The chart below shows how many miles you’ll earn, depending on what class you’re in. BA call this a “Cabin Bonus”:
Code:
Cabin Economy Economy WT+ Club FIRST
Fare Class NVRKMLOS Y B H W T J C D I F A
Miles 25% 100% 125% 150% 200%
Award fares don’t earn any miles or Tier Points at all. These are tickets booked in to X, P, U and Z respectively.
In addition to this, Silver members get a 25% bonus on the base mileage, and Golds get a 50% bonus on the base mileage. BA call this a “Tier Bonus”.
For short flights, there is a 500-mile minimum. However, if you’re travelling on a cheapy ticket, you still only get 25% of this (which is 125 miles as mentioned above). The Gold and Silver bonus is actually calculated from the 500, so Golds then have the bizarre situation of your Tier Bonus being more miles than the actual flight.
Right, these are the rules, but how does it actually work?
I’ll take an LHR-BOS flight as first example. A Gold is travelling World Traveller Plus:
Base mileage 3265
Cabin bonus 816
Tier Bonus 1633
TOTAL 5714
Let’s take an example of a Silver travelling LHR-CDG on a cheap N class economy ticket:
Base mileage 125
Cabin bonus 0
Tier Bonus 125
TOTAL 250
I hope that makes sense. Another very useful link is:
http://www.britishairways.com/travel...c&sec=execclub
which is BA’s own calculator tool and will give you the exact miles they will award you.
In addition to earning miles for flying, you can also buy miles from BA. You can buy up to 15,000 miles per calendar year, in 1,000 mile increments.
Below is a table, illustrating how much it costs to buy miles
Code:
1,000 £31
2,000 £47
3,000 £63
4,000 £79
5,000 £95
6,000 £111
7,000 £127
8,000 £143
9,000 £159
10,000 £175
11,000 £191
12,000 £207
13,000 £223
14,000 £239
15,000 £255
You can also buy miles for other members in your HHA, up to 15,000 per year each.
Buying miles looks expensive, but can be good value if you’re just short of an award. A few hundred pounds worth of miles, when compared the cost of a revenue premium class ticket, compares quite favourably. However, unless you definitely need the miles in the short term, there are cheaper ways of accumulating them – for instance buying products from Tesco which come with bonus points.
Miles can’t be transferred between accounts.
I’ll talk about earning miles from places partners such as Avis, Tesco, Shell and others in the partners section.