Originally Posted by
Jonally
First time poster here
Hello! Welcome.
Hopefully one of the ambassadors will give you a proper greeting later.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
excuse me if this is a naïve question.
No stupid questions, for stupid answers, see above and also here...
Originally Posted by
Jonally
I am new to collecting Tier Points but I must confess I find myself a little perplexed by the lengths that some people will go to acquire points and status.
Yes, it's mostly bonkers but you've got to have a hobby.
Many folks on here are looking for lifetime gold or gold guest list status at 35k or 100k TPs respectively. You don't get that by just going on a few club Europe holidays a year, but the idea is that when work stop paying for your expensive premium flights because you retire you still get top level benefits.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
next April and we should be able to do a few more trips,
Ideal because all TP years will start on April 1st 2025 so whatever your current TP year is, that would be the time to start your next collection.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
mainly Europe and USA. We usually travel Economy or Premium Economy,
This is a good way to travel to make best use of silver status but not the easiest way to gain or maintain it as you have seen. So somehow you are going to end up paying BA for CE and CW tickets on a rolling basis. Just make sure to add in economy ones as well. Since you will be getting avios you might find that you get the benefit there as you are London based so short haul rewards in Y are not the nonsense for you that that are for me starting in MAN.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
BA 5 day holiday to Rhodes in October in CE which with double points gets us 360 points each. This would cost about £800 more than if we travelled Economy.
An additional £400/person doesn't sound like the best possible bargain. How are you getting to 360 TPs? Do you have to fly via somewhere? I make it 80 TP each way so times 4 is 320.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
We usually do a short trip to Brussels or Amsterdam after Christmas. If we did this in CE this would bring us 80 points each for small extra cost, say £200/300.
I would be tempted to do this outside BA as it will be a lot cheaper and you aren't getting many TPs for it.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
In the February half term would do another BA 5 day holiday, but probably short haul e.g. Seville, Malaga or Valencia.
IMO Better to do this sort of holiday in economy once you have your status.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
My question is, does this seem like a sensible approach?
It's sensible in that you are looking at the trips you intended to take anyway. But IMO you are spending too much extra to get not a lot of extra value.
To make it worth it you would need to get the benefit from the CE product over the ET one, and the remainder of the benefit would be lounge access and seat selection. I don't think two of the trips are long enough to get the benefit from the CE product although until you make silver it does also give you access to the lounge.
Originally Posted by
Jonally
Am I missing something that would get us to the target quicker or cheaper, given the constraint of not wishing to spend days just flying for the sake of it.
In my opinion you would get better value by picking a holiday based on a cheap long haul destination in Club World and downgrade 2 of the shorter European trips back to Economy, perhaps even later in the year when you may have already got silver from a CE trip to Rhodes and a CW one to New York.
Or if you do two trips this year before next April, then you can start planning as many Euro-hops as you like in economy and just one or two bigger trips a year to get your 600 TPs on a rolling basis.