orbitmic

The question may be legitimate but the legitimate answer certainly is remarkably simple and straightforward: just don’t.

NWIFlyer

Please allow me to put my Community Director hat on to clarify this. Coupon Connection exists to reward those who've contributed positively to the main FT forums - and continue to do so. It gives them the opportunity to exchange one travel product for another where permitted legally and under a loyalty scheme's Terms and Conditions.

We have started trialing allowing this to happen in limited airline forums where appropriate, but only for specific giveaways (e.g. AA upgrade instrumenrs). There is no free-for-all in the general forums.

There have been examples in the past where airlines have advised us that some exchanges are in breach of their (often revised) terms and we have been asked to prevent them taking place, even in Coupon Connection. As FT does not promote acting against either the law or a program's terms, we comply with those requests.

Greenpen

When threads like this crop up there develops a holier than thou attitude about morality and the absolute right of terms and conditions. This is in sharp contrast to most threads when they cover, for example, minor technicalities allowing people with incorrect documentation and dodgy itineraries to lift their hearts in hope of a bumper pay out, or again, exploiting the occasional J fare to SYD that gets loaded at £32.47 rather than a hundred times that!

corporate-wage-slave

You may have a point, and by all means PM me if you spot a £33 fare to SYD. But when -every few months - we get a non-regular FTer who is reeling from being subject to an audit by BA and thus locked out of their account, I can't help thinking that concerns about Avios trading is at the root of the problem. Concerns which may or may not be valid. Those who are regular participants here are largely in it to make best personal use of Avios, so they want to know how to get their totals up and use the redemption options in the best way for themselves. But if you are not really a BA traveller but have somehow got 50,000 Avios then the temptation may well be to trade them. So I think there is an element here of making it clear that trading Avios can have greater repercussions than the £33 SYD fare - the latter BA will just cancel and refund, end of.

orbitmic

Exactly. With respect for the previous poster, I think that very often (and I can think of some other current BA forum threads where similar accusations are being repeated), there is a misperception that whenever the dominant answers given to a question are discouraging (don't do it, this is not going to work, your case is not one the airline will answer favourably, etc), this is interpreted as moral judgement or lack of sympathy.

I don't think that any of the forum regulars are under any misconception that posters - old and new - reach out to us because they are interested in our moral judgement. Nor, for that matter, are many of us interested in sharing such judgement with anyone beyond our close circle of family and friends. The reason people reach out to the forum is because quite frankly, its collective experience and thus understanding of any and everything BA related is in fact quite extraordinary - possibly the richest to be found on this particular airline anywhere in a free and public forum. You get a panel of people from different countries and walks of life but whose combined practice of BA (and often the airline world in general) is truly impressive. In that sense, when people ask: "should I do x?" or "this is what happened to me, do I have a chance of y?" or "I have been told z by BA, is there any way to circumvent that?", 9 times out of 10 and possibly more, we have a pretty good sense (and often a fairly unanimous estimation) of what the answer to those questions. Those are based not on our preferences or moral evaluations but on our collective experience of what either can or tends to happen in real life and how painful it can be to those to whom it happens.

When many of us say "don't do this" when it comes to miles broker, it's not because we think it makes the op a good or a bad person, but because we know how it often ends in real life. In this particular case, it's not even due to our own personal knowledge but because many of us have been reading threads on this forum regularly for years and enough people have come to tell what's happened to them when BAEC has rightly or wrongly suspected people to sell their avios. When we tell people that BA is not going to allow them to freely move their flights to a different date because of a change of equipment it is not because we don't want them to be able to change dates but because we have hundreds of similar cases in mind and we know what sort of threshold BA uses to decide what entitles a passenger to a free itinerary change or not, and even what may constitute a "grey area" where you might as well give it a try and what does not.

I understand that it can be very disappointing for people to come here with the hope that we will find a way for them to get what they want only to hear that our collective experience suggests that they won't. I also fully appreciate how several posters coming to the same conclusion can be misperceived as their "ganging up" against a position, but sometimes, in life, the simplest explanations are in fact the correct ones. In this case, the law of numbers is such that when many different people have experienced the same situation very many times, chances are that their forecast of its outcome is not going to vary.

Those forecasts are not always gloomy. When we get hundreds of threads with people asking if there will be any issue if they skip the last segment of their trip when travelling with hand baggage only, the answer they get from all of us is "you'll be fine" not because we think it is good or bad but because they will be. When we get hundreds of threads with people explaining that they have unfortunately suffered some significant health issue which makes it impossible for them to take their flight, we tell them to call BA and that they will most likely be allowed to change the ticket date without issue not only because we sympathise but because from our collective experience, we know that BA will routinely help in such case. Conversely, however, when we are asked about mileage brokers, about getting compensation for something we know BA will not compensate, or for how safe it is to book two separate itineraries with a couple of hours between the arrival of the first and the departure of the second with people hoping that their itineraries will be jointly protected and their baggage through checked just because it seems to be "common sense", we can only say what we know, ie that this is just not a good idea, all the same. Whenever possible, some of us will usually add whatever other adaptation may mitigate the damage and offer a creative option, and some times, there is simply no such glmmer of hope.

Whilst I am sure that some will see this process as tough and judgemental, I have no doubt that conversely, many posters, whether they say so or not, will likely feel a little bit of gratitude for having found here exactly what they were looking for: experienced and collective advice on what could be their best course of action or what will likely be the outcome of a given situation.

flatlander

Very well said, you should post this as the intro to the entire forum.

GlasgowBlue

Forgetting even the “it’s against the BAEC T&Cs”, “you’re opening yourself up to the risk of an audit” arguments for one minute, the risks associated with giving your login details to a complete stranger just seem off the scale to myself.

Someone with an ulterior motive could reek absolute havoc with not only your travel plans but potentially your personal life and beyond. Given many (the majority?) of the general public (including myself) use the same or very similar passwords for multiple accounts/logins, the potential consequences send a shiver up my spine.

Even if the “broker” is 100% legit and honest, all it would take would be leaning against the keyboard, a couple of inadvertent clicks, someone working from home and a child battering the keyboard while they’re distracted etc etc, and all of a sudden the expensive family summer holiday booked during the winter sale has been cancelled and it’s now double the price to rebook.

It’s a massive “would I hell!” from me. There are plenty of legitimate ways to covert your Avios into “every day spend” transactions (eg Nectar points, Wine Flyer) if using them for travel is no longer appealing or feasible.

BA850

I think the question has been well-answered, but to the OP: On the face of it, even considering handing your personal login details to a stranger is absurd. Sorry to be blunt, but that really should have been the end of the matter.

jayer

Just don't.. Things can and do happen to miles and accounts when you go grey market. Let alone black market.

Congratulations on being #2 on the hot thread list even though you only have four posts. You replaced another new poster with a somewhat-similar story on United yesterday, except he or she asserts they were a United 1K with 400,000 miles in their account. (Which United closed. They were upset. So was United).

If you have more miles than you think you can ever possibly use, then find a deserving friend or relative that has a legitimate need and spring for their ticket. (Back when we had more AA currency than we knew what to do with, we flew a seriously-ill missionary back home from Asia, and a few people last-second with family emergencies they could not otherwise have afforded to go to).

But since I mentioned it in the title, I hope this isn't some kind of a Mass Communications class experiment in how many threads you can get with a teaser post. Might have seen a few of those on Flyer Talk over the years. (But hey, if it was you did get 24 posts in two days).

SonTech

With the soon to be implemented 2 stage authentication would it not be impossible to even give someone your log in details?

ijgordon

I haven't looked at the details of what BA is actually doing here, but no, 2FA does not make it impossible, just more impractical. Certainly you can be prepared, for example, to forward the 6-digit code you received via SMS to the person trying to log in.

golfmad

This thread took a 90 degree turn in the direction of the legitimacy of guesting strangers into lounges. This has been split off into a new thread and can be found here:

Is guesting a stranger into a lounge, brokered via this or other forums, legitimate?

Let's allow this thread to focus on the original topic.

golfmad
Moderator: BAEC Forum

IMH

Trust that instinct.
The broker would not "transfer" your Avios. They would log in to your account, as you, and redeem your Avios for a ticket in the name of one of their customers. That person would pay them for the ticket. Your BAEC account would remain associated with the ticket.

GumshoeW12

Indeed, and if the person who buys the ticket from the broker has done it before and is already on BA’s radar, that’s an immediate red flag.

One can claim one was just booking for a friend or colleague but if that person’s got previous, one’s case starts to look very weak.