British Airways has spent the past year telling us that The Executive Club needed modernising. Too many people in the lounges. Too many clever routings earning status on the cheap. Too many Gold cards clogging up the First Wing on a Tuesday morning. The solution, unveiled with great fanfare, was The British Airways Club: a revenue-based programme where tier points finally reflect what you spend, not where you fly.
Or at least, that was the theory.
At launch, BA offered a temporary tier point cabin bonus to soften the landing for existing members during the transition period. Now, a few months later, BA has announced that the tier point cabin bonus is here to stay – even though it has little to do with spend. Instead of rewarding high-paying passengers per pound spent, BA now hands out flat-rate boosts based entirely on the cabin code stamped on your boarding pass. It doesn’t matter if your Club World fare is £899 in a sale or £4,000 the week before half term. It doesn’t matter if you fly all the way to Santiago or just pop to Boston. The bonus is fixed and predictable.
This single move exposes the tension at the heart of the new BA Club: BA wants a revenue programme, but it also wants flexible tools to shape who qualifies for status. The outcome, from the traveller’s perspective, is a loyalty programme that feels less like a transparent system and more like a dial BA can turn up or down whenever the numbers look a bit off.
If you’re unfamiliar with how the British Airways Club works, read Our review of The British Airways Club
A Target Then a Subtle Workaround
When BA revealed its new tier point thresholds, the numbers were deliberately intimidating. Bronze now requires 3,500 Tier Points, Silver 7,500, and Gold a staggering 20,000. And because tier points are earned at 1 point per £1 of qualifying spend (excluding taxes and fees), the real spend needed is significantly higher. Silver – the lowest status that provides lounge access – requires something closer to £9,000 once you strip out taxes and other charges. Gold creeps towards £24,000.
This wasn’t an accident. BA openly wants fewer Gold members, largely because its First lounges have been overwhelmed for years. The new threshold is designed to push most ardent status seekers back into the business class lounges where, as BA would probably put it, they “belong”. Sadly, as a byproduct, a large number of Silvers won’t be able to hit the £9k total spend threshold and end up losing lounge benefits as lowly Bronze BA Club members.
But the thresholds alone don’t give BA enough control. They set the baseline, sure, but they’re too blunt to regulate the number of Silvers and Golds in a dynamic travel market. So BA has introduced levers that allow them to “tune” things in real time.
The BA Holidays double-tier-point scheme remains alive and well. Seasonal multipliers are still very much in play. An upcoming BA Amex feature promises up to 2,500 Tier Points per year. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) contributions earn points. And now, a permanent extra tier points bonus delivers fixed amounts per flight, based solely on cabin.
BA wanted a revenue-based scheme. Then BA built several ways to bypass it when the data requires a gentle nudge.
A Revenue Programme… That Isn’t Entirely About Revenue
The new permanent bonus looks simple on the surface:
- Euro Traveller: +75 Tier Points
- Club Europe: +175
- World Traveller: +150
- World Traveller Plus: +275
- Club World: +400
- First: +550
These apply per flight, not per return. On paper, those are chunky boosts. A Club World return earns 800 extra Tier Points, and First earns 1,100. It sounds generous until you stack it against the new Gold threshold of 20,000. A First return barely dents the target.
But the bigger issue is conceptual.
A revenue-based programme should reward revenue.
This bonus rewards the cabin, and nothing else.
A heavily discounted business class fare earns the same fixed bonus as a fully flexible one. A 45-minute hop to Dublin earns more bonus tier points in Club Europe than a 12-hour economy flight to Cape Town. The maths has drifted back into the world BA claimed it had outgrown.
If British Airways really wanted to tie loyalty to spend, a tier point bonus wouldn’t exist in this form. Its presence tells us something more important: BA wants a system that looks revenue-based, but behaves in a way that gives them granular control over the number of people renewing Silver and Gold.
Loyalty By Algorithm
This is where the mixed messaging becomes more obvious. British Airways hasn’t created a consistent model for earning club tier points. It has created a framework that allows them to adjust the output without changing the headline numbers.
If they want more Golds or Silvers in one year, they can:
- Increase the fixed bonus
- Extend the BA Holidays multiplier
- Add a summer accelerator promotion
- Make Amex tier points easier to earn
If they want fewer:
- Reduce or remove the fixed bonus
- Reduce or pause BA Holidays tier boosts
- Tighten T&Cs around partner earning
- Limit which fares classes are eligible for bonuses
The model allows BA to publish the thresholds once, then fine-tune everything else indefinitely. It’s a very clever commercial design. But from a passenger’s standpoint, it’s a loyalty programme built on shifting ground.
The Growing Risk for Mid-Tier Frequent Flyers
For travellers who spend £8,000 to £20,000 a year on travel – not small numbers by any measure – BA’s new structure introduces real risk. In this middle bracket, you can spend a great deal, fly often, and still find your progress dependent not on your own choices, but on whether BA decides to continue a bonus that year.
The new BA Club forces you into a game where:
- The target is enormous
- The earn rate depends on BA’s mood
- Bonuses can appear or disappear without warning
- And the value proposition shifts along with them
If you’re a corporate traveller on a large budget, this is all background noise. You’ll hit Gold because your employer is underwriting it. If you’re at the sharp end of the cabin on long-haul company travel, the bonus is a welcome tailwind.
But if you’re a frequent flyer with a meaningful yet finite personal or small business budget, things feel much more precarious. You’re working towards a goal that BA can adjust at any moment.
Loyalty is supposed to encourage consistency and certainty. BA’s version now feels like speculation.
The Inevitable Conclusion: Many Will Look Elsewhere
The irony of all this is that BA’s new design may push away exactly the travellers who used to be its most reliable mid-tier loyalists. Those who don’t spend £20,000 a year with a single airline, but do spend enough to matter to most competing carriers. We fall into that bracket. Since the announcement, we’ve moved around £14k travel spend to other carriers and have qualified (not status matched) for lounge level status with Star Alliance and SkyTeam.
Airlines with mileage-based earning or lower revenue thresholds will see opportunity here. Expect a wave of status matches and promotions through 2026 as these travellers hedge their bets. And for us? For the routes that make little sense to fly SkyTeam or Star Alliance, we might try for The Finnair Plus Route to Oneworld Sapphire.
BA will argue that this is their programme and they can decide who qualifies. And they’re right. However, the mixed signals – a revenue model here, a cabin-based boost there – make it harder for many flyers to commit serious spending without feeling like the goalposts could shift midway through the collection year. This could be frustrating if compromises were made to channel your spend towards BA. Let’s also not understate the complexity of it all – many folk won’t be bothered with the headache of calculating it.
If you’re in that middle bracket, you now face a simple question: Do you trust the BA Club enough to gamble your loyalty budget on it?
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