PrivatePilotDR40

Good Morning (UK TIME)
I am currently sat in my office -2 days from a WTP to SFO wondering if it would be worth paying £1200 to reach Gold (Tier Point Run to get me over the line). Now, I know it is very personal and will be worth different if you flew say 30+ long Haul compared to 10 Long Haul. However, in General, how much would you value being BAEC Gold?
The reason I ask as above, I could do a TP Run (would be my first) to become gold, but it would be at the cost of around £1200. For work we Fly W class, and I estimate I will do around 10-15 Long Hauls a year and a few EU routes for holidays etc. Now, being in my situation would you £1200 for gold over silver? Is First class lounge and check in really worth this amount? I am not going to hit any of the other Tier Point rewards etc.

Globaliser

No, it's definitely not worth £1,200 if you will naturally be Silver anyway.

corporate-wage-slave

Only you can work out what the value is, it's a personal choice, otherwise there would (e.g.) only be one car type on the road, Trabant style.

But here is a good starting point: how frequently do you depart from LHR T5 in a year? You can add in any Flagship check-ins you do, and assuming The First Wing comes to T3 next year, the T3 trips too.

Stez

As you recognised, YMMV.

I generally see how my travels go in the year and see if I have any AUPs that nudges me over the TP earning limit. Last year's flight patterns meant that I would be around 240 TPs short of gold but I knew in the new membership year that my flights would increase to around 2 NCL-SYD per month), so I did my first ever TP run earlier this year (NCL-LHR-TLL-HEL-LHR-NCL) to maintain my gold.

Had my new membership year had significantly fewer flights, I would have been happy to drop to silver as I find that with less flying, I don't really miss the benefits of gold as I don't need the little things to make life easier as fewer flights means more of a novelty. Whereas with regular flights, I enjoy the little extras such as picking better seats and priority boarding.

Would I pay 1200 GBP for gold... probably not as much as that, but I would certainly AUP if I could.

BertieBadger

Can i just ask you to clarify something, when you say:

Maybe I'm missing something, but a W return would typically net 180TP and so if you were doing 10 returns you'd be comfortably Gold no? So I presume you mean 10-15 sectors here, presumably at 90 TP each?

Reason I ask is that one unexpected bonus for me was the extra Avios, so if you could work out how much more you'd get (as well as how you personally value them) it might influence your thinking. Or not

madfish

Buzzz

In my opinion, the best parts of being Gold are
• First Wing check-in and security
• first lounge
• Increased availability of award seats

Having said that, IMO Fast Track security and Galleries Lounge are perfectly acceptable; hardly worth £1200 for the status.

BertieBadger

Just to put some concrete figures on it by way of example. Flying LHR-SFO in WTP on an E/T class ticket, a Gold will earn 5,358 more Avios for each return trip. Now, if you did, say, 7 returns a year that would be 37,506 more Avios by virtue of being Gold.

Now, maybe those additional Avios would be utterly useless to you. Or maybe they would make WTP->CW upgrades more accessible (and of course, I have no idea how representative the above example is of your actual flying patterns).

Would I personally spend £1200 just for GF and the First Wing. No, I wouldn't. But as everyone will say, YMMV, and it may be the the gold benefits as an entire package do make sense for you at that price.

cupsandsaucers

Lounge visit at £20 per hour. Seat selection £30 per flight, fast boarding £3, fast security £15

That is the rough value I would put on each perk. Queue dependent of Course.

UKtravelbear

An indication of your destinations would be useful.

If it's to the US and you fly AA then Gold does get you Flagship check in and Lounges (Silver only the latter) and ordinary lounges on US domestics but that's not much good if you don't fly to the US or on AA!

F wing + security and Lounge at LHR T5 are nice but not £1200 nice for the 10 long hauls you say you do. At LGW it's still a long walk to security then the lounge. At LCY no lounge at all!

In your example you said 10 long haul flights so that would be £120 of benefits per flight 'gained' from gold over and above what you get from silver . If BA offered F wing and Lounge for that would you pay that much?

Slightly different calculation when you travel on holiday with family or for work with a colleague you could guest in but even then would you be getting value from that £1200?

Personally I was happy when I achieved silver and then I got gold (accidentally due to the timing of one trip if I'd done it a fortnight earlier it would have gone into my old year and been wasted). yes I value those benefits but I'm not really going out of the way to retain - if I do then it's a bonus as I'll still have silver

cheshirepete

You don't drink much champagne then LOL!

Pascoe

I pretty much do as one poster above stated - I monitor the travel and project the end of TP year score at regular intervals, and if I think it's marginal say halfway through the year I start to do a couple of SH AUPs here and there. If not even close though I just accept that the next year I might be silver and stop worrying abt it.

90+% of my travel is out of LHR, and predominantly T5 at that, so GF and F wing security are not worth zero to me that's for sure, but they're not worth a £1200 TP run on a journey I wasn't already going to be making as I am just too busy frankly. I'd love to have the time to do a TP run just for the joy of the flight, but I have a baby and a busy job and all the stuff that goes with these.

However I would definitely scrap harder to maintain Silver. HTH

Cymro

Assuming you fly 70k miles per year, once every five weeks from LHR:

10x GF vs GC lounge visits (£10/upgrade) + the First Wing saving you 15 minutes each @ £30/h = £175
70k miles x 0.5 (the difference in tier bonus) @ 1ppm = £350
Gold Priority Rewards - £100 (but could be thousands!)
Soft landing to silver - Anywhere between £0 and £600 depending on your future travel plans
Long haul economy exit seats - Valuable if you're ever in economy
Better prospects of upgrades - Questionable
Gold line not taking ages to answer the phone - Probably quite useful actually

So anything less than £500 to get gold is a no brainer in my view, so if LHR-SFO is on the cards in Y and it's £500 to upgrade, clearly do it that way. I wouldn't pay as much as you're proposing for gold - how many TPs do you need?

Keep it Riel

Hi Samwilliams88

I'm about to pay £1,100 on a 4 day trip to Portland to maintain my Gold so I must conclude that it is worth it for me!

The extra avios are definitely part of the equation because of the availability benefit - I'm quite avios rich and did a recent trip to Aus where I was able to scoop up pretty much any internal flight I needed for 4,500 avios and a negligible cash payment (less than £10 per sector) - all of these redemptions were on seats made available to me as Gold.

Another benefit not often mentioned is the theoretical seating - I did 4 economy legs in Qatar and 1 long haul economy on Qantas on that trip and on 4 out of 5 legs the magic X on the seating plan kept the seat next to me free which was a real help. Not guaranteed but helpful if you have to travel Y. I've also had 2 upgrades from WTP to Club recently which I think are related...

The main determinant is whether you'd enjoy the trip that is also a TP run - I certainly plan tol!

Mike P

If you can easily afford it and would enjoy the trip then I'd say go for it. Others have pointed out the various benefits above.