As mentioned in my guide to choosing an airline reward scheme, we chose to commit to The British Airways Club (sometimes called the BA loyalty scheme) several years ago and have since benefited from some great rewards, allowing us to take long haul flights with British Airways or its oneworld partners. It is unlikely that we would have completed much of this travel as a family without having embraced the Club.
The British Airways Club, which replaced the Executive Club on 1 April 2025, gives you two currencies: tier points, which set your status and are now earned on spend, and Avios, which you earn on flights, shopping and a credit card and spend on flights and upgrades. We have used it for over ten years and it has paid for most of our long haul travel as a family. Here is how it works and what changed.
*Last checked: September 2026. Scheme rules and thresholds change; the figures below were verified against ba.com in that month. This blog is part of our Reward Points hub.
The first thing to mention is that the scheme changed on 1 April 2025. The old BA Executive Club was rebranded as The British Airways Club, or “the Club”, and the way status is earned was rewired at the same time. Your Avios were untouched by the change; if you had a balance, you still have it. What changed is how you earn Bronze, Silver and Gold, which is now mostly about how much you spend with BA rather than how many flights you take. I will highlight the differences as we go.
Once you have decided to commit to the Club, take the following steps to get started:
With The British Airways Club through the BA website. It is free to join. Make sure that the rest of your family sign up as well. Children can have an account, which matters for the next step.
So that the family members who usually fly with you pool their Avios. One person, the head of household, sets it up from their account and needs everyone else’s membership numbers. More on how it works below.
It shows your account, your status, your flights, and it holds your boarding passes.
Like most airline reward schemes, when you fly with British Airways you are awarded two different types of points:
On the edge of town, with walking trails and some of the best wildflower displays in Western Australia in spring. Point Ann inside the park is the southern right whale calving spot mentioned above.
A type of airline currency, awarded on flights but also in a number of other ways (see below). Once accumulated, Avios can be used to pay for future flights and upgrades.
Reward Flights paid for with Avios do not earn tier points. If you mostly redeem rather than pay, you will stay a Blue member, and that is fine. Blue members can spend Avios exactly like everyone else.
Tier points relate to your membership status with British Airways: whether you are a Blue, Bronze, Silver or Gold member of the Club. The more tier points you earn in a year, the higher your status, and status decides which perks you can access.
From April 2025, tier points are based on how much you spend with BA in the collection year rather than how far you have flown. You earn 1 tier point for every £1 of eligible spend, which means the basic fare and carrier charges but not air passenger duty or airport taxes, on British Airways, American Airlines and Iberia.
From April 2026 there are bonus tier points on top depending on the cabin and fare you book, pre-paid seats and extra bags earn 2 tier points per £1, and contributions to sustainable aviation fuel earn too, up to a yearly cap. BA Holidays packages earn on the eligible package price, split between the travellers.
Runs from 1 April to 31 March. Everyone starts as a Blue member, your status is reviewed at the end of each year, and it can go up or down depending on the tier points you have earned. The total resets every year, which is how the airline keeps you flying.
Blue: The automatic starting point.
Bronze: 3,500 tier points (it was 300 under the old scheme), or 25 flights with a BA flight number in the year.
Silver: 7,500 tier points (it was 600), or 50 BA-coded flights.
Gold: 20,000 tier points (it was 1,500). There is no flight-count route to Gold.
Gold Guest List: The top rung, at 65,000 tier points to earn and 40,000 to keep, with a minimum that has to be flown on BA itself.
It is not easy to accumulate 20,000 tier points, and therefore not easy to reach Gold. You now need to spend a lot of money with BA to get there. Even Bronze means spending £3,500 with the airline in a year. The 25 and 50 flight routes exist, but that is a high bar for leisure travellers and people who do not fly regularly for work.
Blue gets you almost nothing at the airport. Bronze gets priority check-in and boarding. Silver gets the lounge, which is the level most people are really chasing. Gold gets the First lounge and oneworld Emerald status across the alliance. Gold also comes with a dedicated customer service line, which in our experience is the best benefit of all when you need to change a booking.
Are the total you have earned since you joined the Club and its predecessor, the Executive Club. Reach 35,000 lifetime tier points and you qualify for Gold for life. We are a long way off.
Avios used to be Airmiles; the name changed in November 2011. When we first joined the scheme, one of the things we did was put all our grocery shopping through Tesco and bank the points on the weekly shop. They built up nicely. When the standalone Avios rewards programme closed in 2018, those balances moved into the BA Executive Club, which is now the Club, and they have been part of our pot ever since.
The supermarket route has changed since then – today it is Nectar points that convert to Avios, and the Tesco arrangement is different, so check the current terms before you plan around either.
Each flight, and each paid upgrade, is worth a certain number of Avios, awarded after you have flown and visible in the BA app. Avios on BA flights are based on what you paid rather than how far you flew, so a more expensive ticket earns more, and your tier status multiplies the rate: a Blue member earns 6 Avios per £1 of eligible spend and a Gold member 9, with Bronze and Silver in between.
There are now seven programmes that use Avios: The British Airways Club, Iberia Club, Aer Lingus AerClub, Vueling Club, Qatar Airways Privilege Club, Finnair Plus and Loganair Loyalty. Balances move between most of them one for one, so a flight with any of those airlines can feed the same pot. BA also has other partner airlines on which you can collect Avios if you enter your Club membership number when booking.
Your Avios do not expire as long as the account stays active: collect, spend, buy or share at least one Avios every 36 months and the whole balance stays alive. That said, the longer you let your Avios accumulate, the more significant the redemptions you can make further down the line.
The Club has a shopping portal with links to a range of retailers which pay Avios on your purchases. Before you buy anything online, check whether the shop is on the portal so you do not miss out:
Click your name at the top of the page, select "Collecting Avios", scroll to "Shopping" and click through to the Avios eStore. From avios.com it is Collect, then Shop.
If it is there, click through to the retailer from the portal and make your purchase as normal.
Check your statement to make sure they have landed.
There are over 2,000 retailers on the eStore, from supermarkets to insurance to holidays, and the rates move about.
Marks & Spencer was paying 1 Avios per £1, so a £250 shop earned 250 Avios, and IHG hotels were paying 15 Avios per £1 on stays booked through the eStore. If you are going to buy it anyway, buy it through the eStore and collect the Avios.
The Avios app does the same job from your phone: link it to your Club account with your membership number and it shows you which retailers earn.
Some accommodation booking sites, such as Airbnb, are on the shopping portal, so remember to go to Airbnb through the portal. I have done this and it all works smoothly. With others, such as Booking.com, you may need to book through the site and enter your Club membership number.
Similarly, you can earn Avios on car hire booked through the BA website, perhaps as part of a BA deal added to your flight booking, or on the car hire company’s own site by entering your membership number.
Tom, our co-writer, gained Avios via hiring an Avis car on his road trip across Southern Australia + Victoria.
Keep a look out for special deals – sometimes for referring someone to an Avios credit card, sometimes on wine purchases or other products.
There are several credit cards which pay Avios on your spending. My advice would be to research carefully before choosing one, as some have an expensive annual fee and some require a certain amount of spending each year. Pick one that suits your circumstances. The cards vary in the sign-up bonus and in the Avios paid per pound.
The British Airways American Express card is the one we use. Our decision was to use it in the following ways:
To buy our weekly grocery shopping, and pay it off at the end of the month.
To buy any large purchases for the house, such as furniture, bedding and electronics, and pay it off at the end of the month.
To put our business expenses on the card, as my husband is self-employed.
To buy flights when the time comes round, because BA purchases earn extra Avios on the card.
This system has allowed us to stockpile a healthy amount of Avios over the years and, to be honest, probably more than we can reliably use in the time we have. Three things to note:
There are two versions of the card. The British Airways American Express card has no annual fee and pays 1 Avios per £1. The Premium Plus card has a £300 fee and pays a higher rate; that rate is changing from 7 October 2026, so check the current figure before you decide the fee is worth it.
Both cards charge on spending abroad, so we try not to use the card when we are away except in an emergency.
Like any credit card, clear it every month or the interest will eradicate any savings you might otherwise be making.
Is perhaps the best benefit of the card. Spend £15,000 on it in a card year and you are awarded a voucher that lets two people fly for the price of one on a Reward Flight. Used with a pot of Avios, those vouchers have allowed us to take long haul flights for minimal amounts. The full mechanics, including how we used two to fly four of us to Dallas, are in our Amex companion voucher guide.
Flights taken with Avios are not free. You need to pay the taxes, fees and carrier charges for the flight, and on a long haul BA flight those charges have risen since we started, to a few hundred pounds a person in business class after the increases of December 2025 and May 2026. The Avios cover the fare, which is the expensive part. It is worth going in with your eyes open.
The BA website will show you how far your Avios will get you, so start by having a look at what your Avios are worth to you before you spend them.
We have typically taken the view not to redeem our Avios on short haul flights, and to keep them for long haul when we might even have enough to fly business (handy for night flights rather than day flights).
If you are thinking about booking a transatlantic flight with Avios and can see flights with other airlines for a similar price to the taxes you would pay, hang on to your Avios or use them for an upgrade instead. Make sure you can see a clear benefit before you redeem. You are in this for the long game.
Off-peak flights need fewer Avios, so travel outside school holidays if you can.
There may only be a few Reward seats on any flight, so it pays to book early, ideally as soon as the flights are released.
A Reward Flight on a partner such as Iberia, Aer Lingus or Qatar Airways can carry lower charges than the same route on BA. Worth checking before you book.
After every flight, check that the right Avios and tier points have been added. You can claim missing Avios and tier points up to six months after the flight.
The household account is the part of the Club that makes it work for a family:
It is free. One member, the head of household, sets it up and adds the others using their membership numbers. Up to six people can be added, so seven in total including the head.
Everyone keeps collecting Avios individually, but any member can spend from the pooled total. BA deducts the Avios proportionally from each member's balance.
Children can be added, which is how under-18s hold a Club account at all. Members need to be 18 to spend.
Tier points are not pooled. Status is individual, which is one more reason we do not chase it.
The 36-month activity rule is the same as for a solo account.
Household Avios can be spent on the members. To book for someone outside the household you use the separate Friends and Family list, which has its own rules on how often names can change.
Our four accounts feed one balance, and every long haul redemption we have made has come out of it.
When you start to look at an airline reward scheme such as the Club, it can look a bit overwhelming with the different types of points and the rules for redemption. However, it is worth persevering, as it all starts to make sense once you have booked a couple of trips using reward points.
The previous version of the scheme, up to 31 March 2025, worked very well for us over ten years and enabled us to take several special trips overseas as a family.
The changes from 1 April 2025 looked significant at the time, and eighteen months on our verdict is settled – status is now out of reach for a leisure family like ours, and we have stopped thinking about it. Avios, the household account and the companion voucher are the reasons we stay, and none of those has got worse. If that is what you are in the Club for, it still works.
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