I'm a member through a ECCA scheme. All I can say is when I was just a few points short of Gold - and we are talking 20 or so - I called the normal EC account lines and was stonewalled. So I made a few called to our purchasing dept., found out who handled our account within BA (we spend much, much more tham 250K/pa) and asked the (BA) account manager if there was anything they could do. No problem. Sorted in 5 minutes.