Hi there!

I am a new member, although I have been reading the forum for some time.

I am from Finland and obviously flown mostly with Finnair, and their Plus-program is of no use for someone buying cheap offers a couple of times a year.

However, I just booked flights to Africa for the whole family, and accidentally the cheapest tickets were offered by BA (HEL-JNB was 800€, LHR-JNB would have been 1600€..go figure). They promoted their Executive Club and I joined. Or the whole family joined. Their calculator shows that we would be getting over 65.000 Avios for the trip and the "how to spend your Avios"-site told that those points already would be enough for HEL-VCE-HEL for two people in couch (the trip we are planning next).

Finnair in general seems to give less Plus-points per route and charges almost twice as much points for reward flights.

Are there really that big differences in reward programs or did I miss something? I have never given that much thought on these since I always go for the lowest prices. But if we get a shorter European trip for a couple of people for the BA flat rate everytime we take a longer vacation..it's madness!