When I started routinely travelling for business I was working for a US based company, making 5-6 transatlantic flights each year then multiple US based short hauls for each of those trips between our various offices. The majority of these just happened to be American hubs so it made most sense to sign up with AA’s loyalty program. This served me very well for many years and was a no-brainer until a few things changed.

First was the elimination of the AAdvantage American Express card in the UK, this prevented me from earning any spend-based status or mileage on American and they have not replaced this with any other UK based loyalty credit card option. As such I switched my credit card to a Barclays British Airways card. The second was a change in employer, this saw me doing less US trips and more Europe & India based trips. Typically with British Airways. The third was that I exhausted my love of the US having travelled all over and want to use more of my rewards to travel to non-US destinations, which is hard to do with AA miles being based in the UK.

So I’ve now got myself into a bit of a pickle. I still hold high status with American, so I use my AA flyer number when booking on BA - giving me lounge access, boarding and upgrade perks. However my spending based miles are going onto my BA account with no status (Blue). So I’m splitting my miles and not getting any perks when trying book reward flights with BA.

The current situation is I have about 150k reward miles with AA and Platinum Pro status, and about 350k miles with BA but no status.

I want to consolidate this all to BA going forward but it seems I’m between a rock and a hard place. I have asked BA for a status match but they made it clear it was out of the question. So it seems the only option is to have a ‘no status year’ with BA and have to go without any perks for 12 months until I qualify for the BA status.

Is there anything I’m missing? Can I somehow start to earn my status miles on BA while still leveraging my OneWorld Emerald status? Is there a way to game the system by checking in with my AA loyalty number then changing the loyalty number to my BA club number just before the flight?

Or is taking the year’s status hit the only way?