The £90 Fee On My BMI Card - what's it for?
 

I know when I took out the card the £90 included passes to the BMI lounge at T1, and a few other BMI related goodies.

As there is now no BMI lounge in T1, and indeed no BMI, should I ask to have the £90 fee back? Or would they now offer me something else to warrant the £90 fee?

A greater earning rate than you'd get on the free card? That's got to be worth something, no?

I didn't know they did a free card...... the only one available was this one.
The fact that I get 1 mile per £ on Visa does make a big difference I must admit.

I'll give them a call anyway and ask.

Do you if there was anything else being thrown in with the card apart from the 24k Avios bonus

I thought it was £85 fee these days, not £90?

I paid £85.00 for mine and although the extra points were of some merit the main reason I paid the fee was for the lounge pass.

I recently flew with BA using my Avios and assumed I would be able to use my BMI lounge pass in the BA lounge at T3 Manchester Airport but they refused. I was very frustrated with this as to my mind BA have renegued on an obligation of BMI.

I'm going to complain as I feel cheated by BA

Welcome to FT, SlowRocket. Hope you stick around - although possibly it might not be on this forum :D

I'm afraid I strongly suspect you'll get no-where - if you needed the lounge passes in the first place it meant you weren't flying enough to get BD*S, which would have entitled you to lounge access on a BMI flight anyway. Unless your flying pattern has changed dramatically, BA are not going to regard you as anything other than an low volume traveller and the sympathy you get will be considerably less than a Gold Card holder (it may not be right, but it's reality).

They will also have the legal ground - the passes only ever entitled you to access if you were travelling on a BD flight. There are no more BD flights - so if you wanted to use them you should have done so before they converted. If you 'renewed' the card then you will have known about BA's takeover (it's was announced well over a year ago now) and I'm sure BA would regard it as inconceivable that you'll didn't realise BD would disappear fairly quickly after completion. (And were you actually travelling on an ex-BD route anyway?)

Anyway, spare a thought for us poor beggars that had to pay £25 extra (when the card fee was raised from £60) year-on-year for the lounge passes that we had absolutely no use for because we were BD*G, or the BD GUV's that BA just reneged on with virtually zero notice!

Yeah £85. Either way it's £85 for a card with two lounge passes that I cannot use.

I don't suppose you happen to know if there were any other freebies thrown in with the offer? 2-4-1 flights or anything like that?

No other freebies, just 2 lounge passes, more miles per £ spent and the status miles each year (plus an extra sign up bonus to start with). The status miles were useful and were justification for the fee for me but I didn't renew after it became clear what was happening with BA.

Not sure if you can change to the free card now as I don't see it being offered anymore on the MBNA website or the Diamond Club site. If you don't think it is worth it and you don't spend enough the justify the cost of the extra miles earned, you might want to try the BA American Express. It only earns 1 mile per £ but has no fee.

I definitely spend enough to make the £85 fee worth it - last year alone I lost out on more than 1,000 miles because some places didn't take Amex (from my Virgin MBNA card) so the BMI card then would have been very useful.

Although I might still query the point of 2 BMI lounge passes and see if I can wrangle something useful out of them ;)

No new cards are being offered. When I cancelled my Plus card in November, because my annual fee was due and the benefits weren't then worth it, I asked about dropping back to the standard card but it wasn't an option.

Hmm, that's a bit annoying.

I do keep checking the MBNA site every now and then for new Avios cards to apply for.

BA's cards are issued by Amex themselves and not MBNA so you won't find anything on MBNA's site.

There has been some chatter on FT (though it may just be wishful thinking rather than based on any actual fact) that the Avios cards might switch from Lloyds TSB to MBNA in the near future.

I know. It's an Avios card I was looking for, not a BA one.

Lloyds TSB avios duo is the other option