British Airways Scare: What’s The State and Is There a Silver Lining?
Last night, a breaking announcement across the internet of a possibly imminent British Airways devaluation caused many people to worry and go into a booking frenzy. Today, the award chart is still intact and some more facts and analysis have been brought to light. Apparently, some people were never worried and Matthew at upgrd.com eloquently explained why he wasn’t (thank you reader Kent C for alerting me to this post).
When nothing changed this morning and it wasn’t clear if something was in the works, there were two facts working for us. In 2011, when British Airways did have a complete award chart restructure, they gave plenty of advance notice that changes would be coming, however terrible. If history is any indication of the present, we should expect they’ll at least give us the same courtesy, to put it mildly. Secondly, MileValue sent a Tweet to the British Airways Twitter team this morning asking about a devaluation and they swiftly responded they were not aware of any. From what I’ve seen, when a Twitter team is not informed about something negative happening, they tend to evade the question in a less definitive way and say something to the effect of “Please call customer service for pricing.” They didn’t.
What May Be Happening?
After all this, Gary from View from the Wing may just have the clear explanation on what likely happened. When we all thought Iberia was devaluing its award chart, it simply published online the partner award chart it always had. Why didn’t we realize this? Because, for partner flights, the Iberia award chart was not that useful and it was seldom used. Iberia had the same award chart as British Airways did for flights on its own carrier and British Airways and, as a result, many of us just assumed the same chart applied to partners the way the British Airways chart did. The main argument for why British Airways was going to devalue was that it would make no sense for Iberia to have this high-priced partner award chart when you could simply transfer your points to British Airways and book partners flight there. But it looks like that was always the case and nothing has changed, at least for Iberia.
So was all this worrying pointless? Well, as we know, all airlines devalue eventually. I said last night that you don’t want to go dumping miles just to get rid of them. However, if you do have a trip you want to take, I’d book it soon. Devaluation or not, I stand by that statement. Any day our miles could devalue and my motto is always: Expect the worst, but hope for the best. Do not sit on your miles. Use them. If you want to take a trip, get out there and book one!
A Silver Lining?
Where is the silver lining in all this? The whole British Airways scare got me thinking about how people tend to treat miles. I know many people who collect heaps of miles, build up large accounts and sit on them (you know who you are!). I never advocate doing this and I always say we should never sign up for credit cards or accumulate large miles balances without a clear plan to use them. Miles are not cash. They are illiquid and most of them aren’t worth much when not used for vacations. So if we’re not using them for travel, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having the miles in the first place?
What the British Airways scare did is get lots of people moving. A few examples (please excuse the language).
A nicely planned trip to Ireland:
A few trips to the Caribbean:
$2200 in tickets to Turks and Caicos:
I am willing to bet none of the above three are regretting booking those great trips and neither am I. So if that’s what it takes to get everyone making plans and excited about their travels, maybe we should all conspire and yell “FIRE!” more often.
And in case you still want to look into some great uses for your British Airways miles, here are some posts you may like:
- How to Fly to Canada from 4,500 British Airways Miles Each Way
- How to Visit the Caribbean from 4,500 British Airways Avios Each Way
- How to Redeem British Airways Miles on American Airlines and US Airways Flights
- Redeeming British Airways Miles on Alaska Airlines Flights
- West Coast to Hawaii for 12,500 British Airways Avios Each Way!
No regrets….burned miles I didn’t want……we’ve broken up…………
“In 2011, when British Airways did have a complete award chart restructure, they gave plenty of advance notice”
That’s really not a reasonable take on what they did.
* They announced they would be launching a new program
* They promised that 98% of awards would be either the same price or less expensive.
They did not share any details of their award chart with members in advance.
They did not share that they were going to do distance-based pricing, or that they were going to price each flight segment separately. (You used to be able to make unlimited inline stopovers at no extra cost.)
Premium cabin long-distance awards shot up dramatically. Short haul coach got less expensive. Many more awards from the US went up than went down. BA simply said, “yeah but the 98% figure was true for our UK customers” and it would have been complicated to share the pricing tool in advance.
Their dramatic program changes were very much NOT given any advance notice. They merely told us some changes will be coming. That doesn’t count as notice, and no one saying it does would ever want a program to do that to them again that way in the future!
I have to watch what I say around here! ;) Valid point and I agree my statement is vague about them giving notice about the changes themselves. I’ve rephrased to say they gave notice about changes coming, however terrible, so we could at least use our miles we already had… and making terrible changes overnight without notice would surely be even worse.
Lol, I completely freaked out and was about to start liquidating my 450k avios for things that I was not planinng to do.
But now I know how having a mile is different than a dollar :)