Hey everyone,

As you are aware, BA is encouraging us to place our non-flight spending with BA, including hotel and car hire expenses, which is then classified as a "holiday" and booked by BA Holidays.

For those of us with significant hotel expenses (whether paid for by work or leisure), BA is encouraging us to consider moving this hotel spending to BA. If we do, the carrot is that it will count toward status at BA.

As a GGL, BA offers Hilton Diamond Status as a benefit. However, if BA books a Hilton Honors family hotel with a flight (which is then classified as a holiday), the Diamond status benefits are not typically offered by the hotel. I know there can be individual exceptions, but as a rule, the upgrades, bonus points, late checkout, welcome drink, premium internet, breakfast, and base points earning are not included, as the hotel views the booking as a third-party booking.

Avis does recognise your status if booked by BA holidays, and there's a place to enter your membership number when you book online with BA. Not so for the hotels.

If we book just flights with BA (and not the hotel or car), it is not classified as a holiday. Same-day travel changes are easy (depending on the fare), so if you want to get a different flight on the departure day, BA can make this change easily. If it's a holiday booking, there are different fare rules, and it's more complicated involving calls to Crawley and discretion on the part of BA holidays if they want to move you or charge you.

BA Holidays can capture a significant amount of non-flight travel spend from people like me, but, at the moment, we are often incentivised to book our hotels directly with the hotel to earn status and gain rewards. Or, we make use of a corporate travel firm that has negotiated that member benefits will be offered. Hence, corporate travel firms have this covered so that if you have to use a travel management firm, you still earn your benefits even for "hidden" rates.

Has anyone else considered this and feels that BA Holidays is missing a trick by not having IAG Loyalty negotiate for hotel status to be recognised, earned, and rewarded for BA Club members? I'm unsure whether earning or recognition is required for a specific level (e.g., Silver and above). It could be for anyone? However, feel free to suggest it should be restricted if this makes it more likely that IAG will want to negotiate it (or the hotels will be willing to offer it to top-tier BA Club members only).

It also doesn't matter what your reason for travel is. If you are a leisure traveller and want to spend £10,000 at the Conrad Maldives, that £10,000 hotel spend with Hilton Honors would build up status and points towards future free travel. Put that spend through BA Holidays, and it doesn't, apart from counting towards status, which you might get anyway through flying alone.

For me, why would I spend through BA Holidays by losing earned hotel loyalty programme benefits (to only gain a few extra BA holiday avios typically awareded for booking a "holiday"). This ia all at the expense of building up hotel loyalty by earning (for example, lifetime platinum at Marriott)? And, to not be able to use the BA GGL Hilton Honors status benefit.

I think BA is missing a trick by not having BA Holidays bookings recognise hotel frequent flyer status for Club members.

Thoughts welcome! :-)