Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

You no longer need to get them into an IB account, though I would always recommend someone gets an Iberia Plus account for a number of other reasons.

Vueling Club is where you join up, and it creates an account with Avios.com, the website connected with the master IAG company that owns Avios. Iberia and BA have their own websites and logic, Vueling (and Aer Lingus) use Avios.com instead. Critical at this stage is to use the same address (etc) details as British Airways. This set up stage is a bit clunky but eventually you should end up with an Avios.com account linked to Vueling. Make a careful note of the membership number since the scope for confusion here is enormous should you also want an Aer Lingus or standalone Avios account - you will have 3 logins to the same website. That's for later, but once you have your Vueling account in Avios you then have a mechanism within that website to transfer Avios to your BAEC account.

Two frequent problems here: if you have a Household account there are reports of difficulties, more from Iberia to BA. Secondly if your details in Avios-Vueling don't sufficiently match those in BAEC then the transfer process may not work. Assuming you don't hit these problems the Avios to / from BAEC transfer route should be fairly straightforward and instant. A third problem is that sometimes there are temporary IT glitches which stop the transfer process, perhaps for a day or two, though an hour or two is more likely. So perhaps consider in advance how you can get this to work in terms of stockpiling Avios in different corners. As a fallback there is a transfer mechanism inside BAEC as well, under Combine my Avios, but that isn't reliable either.

If you want a full suite of offerings you would have
- BAEC
- Iberia Plus
- Avios.com standalone (however this may require a UK address and note the need for consistency for transfers to work)
- Vueling
- Aer Lingus
with the last 3 all on Avios.com's platform. You don't need all of these by any means but BAEC and Iberia Plus are the two heavyweights here.