Well, we finally get down to the business of actually earning miles!
First off, you need to actually work out how long a trip you’re travelling on. A great tool for determining the distances between two points in general is this website:
http://gc.kls2.com
The distances aren’t exactly what BA use, but they are pretty accurate. For BA earning specifically, you can use their handy calculator:
http://www.britishairways.com/travel...s/public/en_gb
BA are pretty stingy with miles if you’re not travelling on a Y B H fare or higher. In fact, anything less than that (i.e. most cheap economy tickets), only earn 25% of the total miles (subject to a minimum award of 125). That means if you’re on a flight that’s 1000 miles, you’ll only get 250 miles credited (excluding any tier bonus for Premier/Gold/Silver).
The chart below shows how many miles you’ll earn, depending on what class you’re in. BA call this a “Cabin Bonus”:
Code:
Cabin Economy WT+ Club First
Fare Class NVKMLOQS Y B H W E T J C D R I F A
Miles 25% 100% 125% 150% 200%
Award fares don’t earn any miles or Tier Points at all. These are tickets booked in to X, P, U and Z respectively. The only exception to this is that Gold members get extra award inventory in Economy class only – if there is no X class available but the cheapest fare bucket (V class) is still selling, Golds can have this ‘converted’ to an award class for them. Sometimes, such a booking will show as earning miles (at 25%) in MMB but the miles should not actually credit to your account! Note, however, that BA tickets booked with Air Miles – as opposed to BA Miles –
can often earn miles because they (Air Miles) ‘buy’ your reward ticket from a BA revenue ticket class.
In addition to this, Silver members get a 25% bonus on the base mileage, and Premiers/Golds get a 50% bonus on the base mileage. BA call this a “Tier Bonus”.
For short flights, there is a 500-mile minimum. However, if you’re travelling on a cheapy ticket, you still only get 25% of this (which is 125 miles as mentioned above). The Gold and Silver bonus is actually calculated from the 500, so Golds then have the bizarre situation of your Tier Bonus being more miles than the actual flight.
Right, these are the rules, but how does it actually work?
Let’s take an LHR-BOS flight as first example. A Gold is travelling World Traveller Plus:
Base mileage 3265
Cabin bonus 816
Tier Bonus 1633
TOTAL 5714
Now let’s take an example of a Silver travelling LHR-CDG on a cheap N class economy ticket:
Base mileage 125
Cabin bonus 0
Tier Bonus 125
TOTAL 250
Hopefully that makes sense!
In addition to earning miles for flying, you can also buy miles from BA. You can currently buy up to 19,000 miles per calendar year, in 1,000 mile increments.
Below is a table, illustrating how much it costs to buy miles:
Code:
1,000 £31
2,000 £47
3,000 £63
4,000 £79
5,000 £95
6,000 £111
7,000 £127
8,000 £143
9,000 £159
10,000 £175
11,000 £191
12,000 £207
13,000 £223
14,000 £239
15,000 £255
16,000 £271
17,000 £287
18,000 £303
19,000 £319
You can also buy miles for other members in your HHA, up to 19,000 per year each.
Buying miles looks expensive, but can be good value if you’re just short of an award. A few hundred pounds worth of miles, when compared the cost of a revenue premium class ticket, compares quite favourably. However, unless you definitely need the miles in the short term, there are cheaper ways of accumulating them – for instance buying products from Tesco which come with bonus points.
Miles can’t be transferred between accounts. However, you can book a ticket in someone else’s name, and remember that BA allows one-way bookings – so a friend with only, say, 25000 miles could book you a one-way economy ticket TO the US, and you could use 25000 of your own miles to book the return ticket.
We’ll talk about earning miles from places partners such as Avis, Tesco, Shell and others in the partners section. However, do note that recent reports say that if you buy miles on your BA Premium Plus AmEx they
will post as ‘BA spend’ (i.e. earn triple miles for each pound spent).
A note about SPG transfers
If you need to buy larger quantities of miles than BA allow, you could do so in a round-about way by joining the Starwood hotel programme, purchasing Starpoints and then transferring them to BA (see spg.com). Starpoints cost 3.5 cents each and can be transferred 1:1 to BA Miles. If you transfer 20,000 at once, you also get 5,000 bonus miles. This means that 25,000 BA Miles will cost you (20,000 x 3.5c x roughly $2 to the £1
) = £350. You can buy up to 20,000 Starpoints per year. If you are not already an SPG member, you cannot buy points until you have been a member for 30 days.