schalliol

My family of 5 and I are going to take a trip to South America where American Airlines flies, but only I fly routinely. I don't however want to waste those miles. I have both BA and AA accounts, with more miles on American since I'm based in the USA.

What I was thinking was creating British Airways accounts for everyone and building a British Airways household account. Then I thought I could book on AA.com and use my AA frequent flier number because I'm more likely to get premier there than on BA and using my family's BA numbers. I imagine I can do this, but I can't envision where to put the BA # in during the booking process on AA.com. The result hopefully would be that I'd build more AA miles while my family would build BA Avios as part of household account that I could book from for more family trips. If I'm not a BA premier at the time, I think I'll have to make sure to keep their miles alive before they expire.

Is this a sensible way to go that should work, and do you have different ideas? Thanks!

Globaliser

If you think you might be a candidate for Premier on BA, you probably already know that you can't get it by flying. It's a status that isn't related to frequent flyer earning.If the AA booking process does not ask you for a frequent flyer number while you're booking, there will be a way of inserting a frequent flyer number after booking. One or other of those times will be the point at which to give their BA numbers to AA.

UKtravelbear

So what you want to do is book flights for your trip via AA.com but keep your AA number for your flights but use BAEC for the rest of the family so their miles post to BA?

Yes that's possible. When you add each family member to the booking remember to add their BA number in the appropriate place in the booking. IIRC there is a specific question about FF programme and number after inputting their name, passport etc

Then when you want to use the BA avios in the HHA you would then book the flights via your BA account and then utilise the avios across all members pro rata to the balances.


When the OP says 'premier' I assume they just mean get status and not have *proper* premier status

schalliol

Oops. I was not familiar with Premier, but I see now what it is (very cool for those who can use it). I was thinking of Tier status.
Thanks!

So, does the strategy I mentioned above seem like a sensible approach? Thanks!

schalliol

Thanks for confirming! I apparently was replying to the other poster as you replied. This is what we'll try to do. I appreciate it!

Globaliser

This depends on how much your family members would earn for these flights in the AA scheme and in the BA scheme respectively (or in some other frequent flyer scheme), what you're intending to use the earned miles/points/Avios for, and how many miles/point/Avios you'd have to redeem for that.

schalliol

All great points for sure! Thanks!

At present, I only have 41,430 Avios, which predominantly were earned via BA from US to Londona and then to Kenya round-trip in Business. It was a fairly last minute flight, and I didn't at the time realize about oneworld (this was 7.5 years ago). My thought was that adding the miles together might make it more possible to get a good redemption. I'll have to do some research on how to figure how many miles people would earn on BA for these flights!

Traveller 935

Usually Avios with BA expiry after 36 months of no-activity, something to keep in mind as keeping BA accounts for the entire family 'active' (when they might not fly BA again in the next few years) could become quite tedious.

https://www.britishairways.com/trave...r/public/en_gb is the easiest place to see how much Avios/TP they'd earn for each particular flight.

UKtravelbear

ah right so you want to set up a BA HHA so that those 47k avios you already have plus X from these new family miles get you a decent redemption on BA at a later date?

Could work as a strategy I guess. Makes sense for you to credit to AA for status and for the rest of the family to credit to BA just for the avios,

Does AA not have the equivalent of a HHA?

The avios you would earn is as per the link in the above post

schalliol

You have my thinking right on. Unfortunately AA doesn't have an equivalent of HHA, which seems to actually be a pretty rare thing! AA's miles expire in just 18 months, so the 36 months with Avios would provide more opportunity to use or find another way to add value for each family member. I'm thinking that if I just have the AA miles, it will be hard to make use of those, and it would be a good amount of work to update every 18 months if we didn't travel on a oneworld airline. It looks like this should be a good way to go, and I wish others had HHA accounts! Thanks again!

UKtravelbear

yes that does sound more sensible and there are various very cheap ways of crediting points to BA avios accounts to reset the expiry date - shopping portal / surveys etc

There is a thread about HHH in the dashboard so have a read of that just so you are aware of all the ins and outs.

VS has a household account but only for Golds and in their case the miles earned get credited to the head of the household and not the individual member.