woglet86

Hi all,

I've got a return trip booked on Qatar, with flights on day 1 and day 8 of my Tier point year. If they're counted as part of the previous year, the 560TP would take me to Gold.

It sounds like the 2 week grace period should apply here if I ask - is there any issue of whether the flights are on BA or partner metal? I've already done the required number of BA segments.

Thanks.

orbitmic

No issue, the grace period is about giving you two more weeks to accrue. How (or with which airline) you accrue makes no difference.

GarynotJerry

Can I just take this opportunity to say how annoying it is that when you request a two-week extension, once it's approved, you have to contact the Executive Club again after you've flown to have it applied. Why can't their useless IT handle such a simple thing automatically? Or, failing that, can't they proactively check when the time comes, rather than making us chase it up?

MSPeconomist

Is there a deadline for these flights to post or can they appear in the FF account long after the grace period ends?

jerry a. laska

No.

Globaliser

You ask for a favour from BAEC, who've put in place a defined process to give you something that you wouldn't normally be entitled to - and you then criticise BA for not implementing a different and more expensive system that would allow you to be lazy about invoking that favour?

It's the sort of whinge that makes people ask what your last slave died of.

FWIW, there is at least one other major oneworld airline which I know provides a similar concession, and runs an almost identical system for getting this processed.

FlyingPhoenix

To be fair, I have had BA staff tell me they will check when the two weeks is up, and arrange the renewal. So, at least some of the agents seem to be able to do this.

GarynotJerry

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind

OkayThen

I agree with most of your sentiment, but out of curiosity what do you think would be expensive about whoever approves the two-week extension going back and checking at the time, and proactively doing the tier upgrade or renewal?

Globaliser

The whinge was actually about building an IT process that would do it automatically. A manual system would probably be less costly.

But there would be two obvious problems that I can immediately think of.

One, which applies whether the system is human or by IT, is that some people change their minds between the original request and the end of the two-week period. They may have had to do some unexpected extra travel, or they may have decided that it's better for one reason or another not to extend the year and to have the TPs from the 9th to the 22nd of the month count in the new year after all. (See this thread for an example of someone whose timing means that there would be no point in trying to renew Silver in the current year: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...-question.html - but that's something they may realise only after the original request is made.) You don't have to read many threads on the two-week extension to see that people do change their minds. So if done automatically, there'd be requests to unwind the extension. For these cases, BA would have unnecessarily spent money on doing the extension at the two-week point and then unnnecessarily spent money on undoing the extension thereafter. Similarly, there will be some who will end up not doing any travel during the two-week extension, but BA would have unnecessarily spent money on proactively checking and calculating at the two-week point.

The second applies particularly to humans: Any human-run system is bound to go wrong. That would cause more work. Actually, come to think of it, given that much of BA's customer-facing IT is not very robust, this would probably apply to an IT system too.

Given that this is a favour being asked for outside the rules, it seems perfectly logical that BA should basically do what its oneworld partner does, ie action the renewal on request when the member has actually done the extra travel and still wants the extension.

FlyingPhoenix

You're welcome! When someone offers a three-month extension on Avios Expiring, that is always automatic, so maybe it is meant to be automatic for tier status as well, and it just never works. That wouldn't surprise me at all, as I agree with Globaliser about BA's IT

OkayThen

Ridiculous but true. If anything, Globalised was being generous to BA in his comments

atmorris

I love all the armchair IT Staff :-)

There has to be a business benefit to implement changes to systems and processes for back office staff, and I can see no business benefit to a process that impacts less than 0.0001% (ish) of BA's customer base.

Just be grateful that BA offer you the grace period, as the majority of other FFP's dont...

Jacaranda

Also by having this as a manual process there is a good chance they may not wipe out the tier points earned at the start of the new year being taken into account for the last year... that way they count going forward too... I know of this happening to someone else before... so that would be a nice bonus!

DarlingStick

Yes, and another thing to bear in mind is if you're short, and you had the difference in tier points within two weeks of your current year, most people will notice this for two weeks after the END, but some people miss asking for it if the flights were in their previous year