As a lurker I thought I would break cover share some personal experiences of some of the pitfalls of doing this. The back story is I moved to US with work a couple of months ago from UK. Had the BA premium amex, household account and just earned silver. In my enthusiasm I moved my account to our US address. This unlocked an interesting chain of events. The ending is mostly happy - but could have gone tits up at any one of many stages and really I caused myself avoidable aggro.

Moving my account address to the US

I committed to doing this without thinking through - it was just another item on a long list of admin I had to do. First thing is it also moved my wife's account (we're in the same household). Fine I thought, she will be here too and we'll be here at least a year so makes sense to be able to get US service centre and promotions.

The BA amex

It was only after I had moved the accounts that I thought about the Amex. I looked on FT and was horrified to see that Amex would see were in US and then shut down the card when the miles were next credited. I didn't want this to happen and my wife would also be very annoyed about her card too. I phoned BA and said I had made a big mistake and wanted to change address back to UK - they didn't buy it. Sorry sir, you'll have to wait six months. Then I phoned Amex to find out if it was the case that they would close the card. They said that was not the case, it was simply that BA would refuse to credit the miles to the account. In the end Amex left the cards open, which meant my wife could continue using her card in the UK but we did not receive miles (We lost 10k miles from our last statements because of this). At this point it became clear there was no point keeping the cards. But I knew the charge was due imminently for my card. If I had been three weeks later I would have been hit for £150 with a miles card I couldn't earn miles on for at least six months. I was lucky and managed to close the card in the nick of time.

The companion voucher

To complicate things I had one in the bank from the Amex. And now I was wondering if I had screwed this up too. I had closed my BA amex - which I then remembered you had to use to pay the fees and charges. I saw from FT that you could get away with using any amex, and I had another amex. I'd use that. But it was a UK registered card and now I was on US BAEC. And then I saw I couldn't activate my voucher online any more - it was showing, but I couldn't use it presumably because of the address change. So I phoned BA in the US expecting the worst. But actually they said I could redeem it over the phone. It took over thirty minutes to do at a cost of course of 2 x telephone bookings fees. But they accepted my US registered (non-amex) credit card. This too could have turned out quite differently.

Moral of story

Think long and hard before moving your account, more so your household account abroad, particularly if you have the Amex and accrued companion vouchers, as you could easily end up in a real pickle. The main cost has been the telephone booking fees - but compared to getting 2 x J IAD - LHR for cost of taxes and surcharges and 100k miles you can't complain too much. However I could have left my wife high and dry without her main credit card (given the experience of some on FT), possibly an unusable companion voucher and a £150 fee for a card I couldn't collect miles on.