I shop at Tesco and have no trouble getting the necessary Avios. My BA Amex spend also gives me a lot of Avios. So too does flying and I also get some from the BA shop.

My focus lately has been on the SPG cards. I regularly churn them with my wife, parents and sister.

I'm waiting for a new Lufthansa M&M visa card from MBNA. I reckon I can put through £35k a year and hopefully a 1.25 per £1 rate should allow me to have nearly 100k miles and combined with occasional Star Alliance flights, an F redemption once every 2 years should be realistic.

if not, then it's back to the Amex Gold cards.

Acquiring airline status through credit card ownership has been common here for many years....to quite a decent level as well. They don't just dish it out to anyone which no doubt keeps down the numbers.
Not as much fun as flying here, there and everywhere to get it right enough but handy for those who'd prefer be on the river bank or golf course. :D

My problem has been not having enough companions to sit in the 2nd seat.

Odd position to be in... .

A BA chase 2-4-1 needs a $30k spend - so 30,000 avios, TATL off peak in Y is 26,000. Although I've lost one or two 2-4-1 in past years due to 'unuse', this year I managed to use 3 of them on TATLs, all for a meager 13k avios/pax/trip - who said the big spenders are gone! (I've also done a further 10 TATL redemptions this year...).

Likewise struggle with this - though my dear mother has enjoyed 2 CW returns to MRU with it, a few have gone wasted. I really think for single travellers there should be an option to make "2 for 1" mean that you can pay half the Avios for a single ticket rather than it always needing to be an offer to pay the same number of Avios for 2 tickets.

This level of couple bias applies to GUF2 too - although I believe you can use it wastefully for one person, a solo traveller could get more value if they could split it into two GUF1s. If that was the case I would certainly aim for it

But the availability of GUF1s at a higher number of TPs suggests that the "couple bias" is a deliberate decision.

I imagine that there may also be a RM effect for 2-4-1s: If BA releases Z1 or U1, it knows that the seat cannot be taken for half the Avios cost using a 2-4-1. That might mean that that single award seat will on average attract a higher yield than each of two seats released as Z2 or U2. All this in the context of an industry in which it's sometimes said that executives would sell their grandmothers for a 2% performance improvement.

Ouch, that's an expensive way to drum up Avios though :eek:

Whilst you can do things to increase your Avios balance godatum, you might be better off saving cash and buying cheap sale tickets with the money saved.