Originally Posted by
WilcoRoger
The limitation the HfP article mentions seems to be that you can move AY<->BA only, not e.g AY<->QR or AY<->IB. Of course nothing stops you to make a second transfer from BA to any other Avios family airlines. This is not confirmed anywhere yet.
As for the upgrading - with AY+ points there is no way to upgrade a QR or a BA flight. Once the points become Avios and you can move it to any of the Avios family (in one or two steps) the upgrade possibility opens up where there was none before.
And of course nothing stops us now to credit AY flights to other programmes - and the incentive to use AY codeshares is going away.
But BAEC and QRPC accounts are linked. Any avios in my BAEC account is visible in my QRPC account so there is no need to tranfer to QR anyway. But that is just the technical side of it, I was thinking about why would they bother with trying to limit AY to only transfer to BA? There is something fisjy with that.
What I read into it is that while they go avios, they will not align anything else. AY eran&burn will be set with the idea that "nothing changed" ie AY-loyals will keep on flying AY and credit to AY and redeem on AY. AY will keep on offering less seats than BA at a different price than BA.
The problem I see is that AY might set low earn rates to support their high price model. Then they will have to set lower award prices because otherwise AY members will not be able to redeem anything. And then BAEC members will have a field day transferring points and book cheaply on AY because their avios are stronger.
We currently don't know anything (Thanks again Finnair for being so upfront and honest
) so everything is speculation. But Finnair doen't have the track record lately for me to trust them getting this right.