shelly67

Sorry all but can't find a newbie lounge for BAEC and struggling to find answer to this.

Currently only Bronze in BAEC and new AA member. Membership year just reset. Already have BA return flights in F(A) booked next April to ORD. Before then, we have booked J(I) flights LHR-MIA-BZE AND return J(I) BZE-DFW-LHR. Booked AA as wanted to try their new business seats/cabin. Joined their club and booked direct through AA. Am now wondering if I should remove my new AA number from the booking and put our BAEC numbers on instead. Would we get tier points still for BAEC or not as it's AA metal and marketed by AA? And full avios? It seems from this forum that we'd get avios but not tier points. We fly premium cabins longhaul only but usually only 3-4 return flights per year, often through USA but am thinking the AAdvantage may be of little value to us as compared to BAEC?

Cymro

Firstly, welcome to the forum - hopefully you'll stick around.

OK, your current bookings look like this on BA:

LHR-MIA-BZE = 360 tier points return but AA metal and flight numbers, so not qualifying flights
LHR-ORD = 420 tier points return, but only two qualifying flights

So, to make silver you will need another two paid flights that are either marketed OR operated by BA.

On AA, you would earn approximately 16k status miles for LHR-ORD on a BA ticket, and somewhere in the region of 9k status miles on a price-based AA ticket. This effectively means that if you credit solely to AA you will just scrape AA Gold (OW Ruby) whereas you would be comfortably into Silver (OW Sapphire) and half way to BA Gold (OW Emerald).

However, as a premium only long-haul traveller, you will benefit very little from Sapphire status as all the benefits come from your ticket. The biggest benefit, apart from possibly better handling if things go wrong/higher upgrade priority (which are too nebulous to value), will be access to domestic lounges in the US, and enhanced mileage earning.

As OW Sapphire you might reasonably expect to earn 25k AA miles but about 42,500 avios on BA (but I am no AA expert). While I'd value AA miles more highly, your 60% better earnings on BA would probably mean you'd still be better off overall, especially if they allow you to buy a premium economy fare and upgrade to business.

So, while it's impossible to say with any certainty, based on those two flights (and multiples of them) I'd probably stick with a BA frequent flyer number for all your trips. What I definitely wouldn't do is earn piecemeal - a big pot of miles is always worth more than several small pots.

Cymro

Just to clarify this:

BA marketed = Qualifying flight, earns tier points AND avios no matter who operates it
BA operated = Qualifying flight, tier points and avios depend on the marketing airline
Other OneWorld (including AA) marketed = Not a qualifying flight unless BA operated. Tier points and Avios from the marketing airline, but only if also operated by a OneWorld airline. (So MH flight number on Cathay metal earns, MH flight number on Emirates doesn't).
Special Qantas exception: Not a qualifying flight unless BA operated. Tier points and Avios from the marketing airline, no matter who operates it UNLESS it is Jetstar (including e.g. Emirates).

Be careful with Alaska: on an Alaska flight number, it earns avios but NOT tier points; on a BA flight number it earns both (but no lounge access unless First) and on an AA flight number it earns nothing.

corporate-wage-slave

And let me add my welcome to you shelly67, welcome to the forum and as you can see there are lots of really helpful contributors here. Please help keep this place useful by continuing to contribute.

A few extra points to add in
- a key advantage of BA Silver or Ruby is a relatively swift route to free seat selection, and Silver of course gives lounge access on economy flights. So I suspect staying with BA is best unless you are USA based when things get more complicated.
- you also get qualifying flights when flying Iberia too, but not their codeshares, just their own metal.
- generally speaking, and having been there and done this, squirreling lots of small piles of airmiles in lots of places is inefficient, hard work, messy, requires a lot of organisation and will lead to losing some via inactivity. Best to accumulate in one airline, one alliance. So I focus my collection via the frequent flyer programmes of BA, Air France and Lufthansa. That works fine at my level of travel. That's not to say you shouldn't have an Iberia account (or even with Vueling, FlyBe and Aer Lingus) but BA is the main home here.

Have a good look at the Stickies on the front of the forum, and then have a look at the Dashboard to see where the knowledge of this forum is all sitting, hopefully you will soon be up to speed here.

shelly67

Thank you both so much for your time and patience.... I think I'm finally getting my head around this 🤣. I've previously been Ag for some time so not really had to think about the issue of seat reservation until we dropped to bronze. We have platinum amex and PP so lounge access not normally of great concern. We only booked through AA as the same flights were massively more expensive through BA (Plus they don't offer the via DFW option) plus get to try new seats plus free seat selection. We only paid about 1850 GBP each return.

If I understand correctly then, if I add my BAEC number to the AA booking now, then we will get the avios and TPs awarded to BAEC at AAs rate but (for us) the TPs awarded will have zero value as to status as they're non qualifying flights but at least I'll have a few extra (more useful for us) avios in our BAEC accounts plus we'll only be forfeiting the AA status that is only the BA equivalent of bronze anyway?

Cymro

Mostly. On those numbers:

1. You'd probably end up as AA's equivalent of Bronze, that's correct. Other flying might take you to AA's Sapphire (Silver equivalent) but that is uncertain, whereas you're very close indeed to BA Silver. As a BA Bronze there's no clear reason why you would want to be an AA ruby as well, especially at the cost of being a BA Sapphire.

2. The TPs may or may not be of any value to you. "Qualifying flights" means that you have to have at least 4 paid flights in your tier year that are any of the following:

i. BA operated; AND/OR
ii. BA marketed; AND/OR
iii. Iberia operated and marketed.

Assuming your F flights are non-stop LHR-ORD you will get 420 of the 600 TPs you need to get silver. With the TPs from this trip, you would be on 770 TPs. However, you would be a bronze at 770 TPs as you would only have flown on two qualifying flights (the LHR-ORD-LHR trip). So, these TPs are only valuable to you if you get <170 TPs elsewhere AND also get two more qualifying flights. That seems quite likely, though; you could easily do a short break to Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Jersey, etc. and make Silver that way.

shelly67

Fabulous thank you so much!!!