POUG from HBO fare, able to utilise same day change
 

Hello
I have a HBO fare and am being offered a POUG to Club Europe.
Do you know if that would then enable free change on day of departure? As this would be the benefit that I would value (unlike the restricted HBO fare).
When clicking through the offer on ba.com, the fare conditions say “no change, no refund”, so perhaps the upgraded fare wouldn’t have same day change flexibility?
Thank you

No. You definitely won’t have SDC after a POUG, even if you were upgrading from a plus fare.

What may work, though, provided you don't check in first and do the change online, is that after the FCOD has moved you to a new flight, you may still be offered a POUG in the app, even fairly late on. Clearly this won't work on a Basic fare though, you can't add flexibility on the cheap.

I thought you could do SDC if CE is available on the swap. If not you can go into ET but you lose the POUG fee. It is complicated after doing a POUG. For instance if you subsequently change your flight to a different date, you get to keep the POUG fee which goes towards any recalculation for an upgrade as part of the change, however if the new flights are cheaper again you lose the entire POUG fee, and I think you also lose it if when changing you keep the original cabin. As the OPs example is for a base HBO fare, however, any date change would need to be into a higher cabin to keep all monies already paid into a new fare. Obviously he only want to do a SDC anyhow.

No. Any poug removes SDC. In the above case there is no SDC to remove as it was a basic fare to start with. Basically if you think you may want to do SDC either book CE to start with, or don’t accept the POUG and follow the cws method.

if you do any change then fare rules rarely allow for part refunds if the new flights are cheaper.

Does this still apply if I do a fare difference upgrade from a Plus fare to Club? It's not a POUG because fare difference is weirdly only £80.

Yes that would allow SDC if it's a fare difference and not a "time limited offer". However getting it actually work for FCOD may well be tricky since the action of changing a ticket like this tends to make all the keywords than enable FCOD drop off. So I very much doubt you will be able to get it to work online, but a contact agent should eventually be able to fix it for a different flight.