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Hi,
I came to cancel my BAPP card the other day after getting the bonus and the 2-4-1 voucher but was told by the amex colleague that I will basically lose my voucher as it has to be booked with on the same card as it was earned on (im not looking to use it right now) and they also sent me the terms and conditions etc which stated that.Im sure this topic may have been discussed before but I just want to double check that if I do cancel will I still get to keep it or are they clamping down and implementing this.
Thank you
One day Amex will clamp down on this because of the FCA ‘loyalty penalty’ work and unfairness to those who pay the full fee. Someone has to be the guinea pig. Sending the terms certainly seems to be an escalation.
It is up to you whether you wish to take the risk and ignore the terms and conditions. Nobody can give you a definitive answer save the practice hitherto.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
@JDB
The “loyalty penalty” aspect presumably arising from insurance products such as home insurance is interesting.
Amex have been raising the T&C point for a while but as yet have taken no positive action.
Personally, I don’t see the value in keeping the BA Black card after the voucher has been obtained and have always managed to utilise another Amex card to pay the taxes. Far better to cancel and earn the bonus again in two years time. Of course all good things may come to an end but I would have been substantially out of avios and card fees had I kept the BA Black card for the 10 years when instead I have been dancing the Amex card shuffle…- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
I think Amex would struggle to enforce this condition from a customer fairness perspective, based on how it is promoted. No reasonable person reading their ads would expect to pay £250 to earn the voucher in the first place, plus another £250/£500 in order for it to remain valid for use.
A reasonable position may be for Amex to say the voucher is forfeited if the card is cancelled during the year in which it is earned (or, more simply, to award the voucher only at the end of the card year), but insisting that you also have to pay for years 2+3 wouldn’t wash.
I think Amex would struggle to enforce this condition from a customer fairness perspective, based on how it is promoted. No reasonable person reading their ads would expect to pay £250 to earn the voucher in the first place, plus another £250/£500 in order for it to remain valid for use.
A reasonable position may be for Amex to say the voucher is forfeited if the card is cancelled during the year in which it is earned (or, more simply, to award the voucher only at the end of the card year), but insisting that you also have to pay for years 2+3 wouldn’t wash.
You may recall a report on here of someone who had cancelled their card, made a change to the booking and when it went off for re-ticketing the agent spotting he was trying to pay with a MC, so BA took 100,000 + Avios and the voucher. It’s easy enough for BA to enforce if they see a non 3791 card being used. If you are going to try to win the argument as above, it will be after the event so many won’t risk being challenged at the airport or at an earlier stage of the process.
When you refer to “customer fairness” it also cannot be fair to the majority of customers who pay £250/pa not only to give the voucher to a few customers for maybe a tenth of that sum but also actually to facilitate that by carrying over spend, pro-rata refunds, giving the voucher immediately, failure to enforce terms and generally allowing unlimited upgrades/downgrades/cancellations. It isn’t a tenable situation in the long term to favour customers playing the system, particularly after the fee increase last year, the improved availability and the greater disparity between the PP and blue vouchers. Ultimately Amex will be obliged to do the right thing, so enjoy the musical chairs.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
Just out of interest (OH has had the same BAPP for 11 years and I usually use my own voucher shortly after triggering it and prior to cancelling), of course BA can spot if a non-Amex card is being used, but would they be able to tell if you weren’t using the Amex with which you earned the voucher? These details aren’t included with the voucher in one’s BAEC account and of course there are times when your might legitimately have a different number, e.g. if it’s been renewed, replaced, or downgraded. Of course they might be able to tell if it’s not a BA Amex (e.g. MR card), but I think there would have to be more communication with Amex to establish whether the Amex used to pay is the one which earned the 241.
Let’s do a quick straw pole on here: Hands up who has used a different Amex card over the years and for several 241 tickets and never had a problem. That’s me for one. Now hands up who has been caught out! I would venture that the former will number several hundred uses of the 241 voucher whereas the latter a mere handful. Some people die travelling in a car but it’s not going to stop me getting into one. Although I might avoid a drunk driver with no seatbelts…
The use of the Mastercard being the latter.- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
@StillintheSun the point is that there is no guarantee that this anomaly will continue forever, not that almost everyone has got away with in in the past, so your pole (sic) won’t tell us anything.
In fact, as with many of these things, the more people do it, the less likely it will continue to be allowed and there are very simple immediate steps that could be taken to block it without changing T&Cs. We may be reaching that tipping point.
@JDB
You are quite right to correct my spelling. Stuck up senior colleagues of mine used to do that when they struggled with my arguments. My point is that your comments should come with a public warning:
“This man works in the financial industry, an industry noted for a rampant lack of probity (e.g. credit card PPI mis-selling) and any opinion is likely to be tinged with corporate bias against the consumer’s interest.”
At least then the reader would have a fair prism to consider your view.@JDB
You are quite right to correct my spelling. Stuck up senior colleagues of mine used to do that when they struggled with my arguments. My point is that your comments should come with a public warning:
“This man works in the financial industry, an industry noted for a rampant lack of probity (e.g. credit card PPI mis-selling) and any opinion is likely to be tinged with corporate bias against the consumer’s interest.”
At least then the reader would have a fair prism to consider your view.I’m sorry but my view is entirely that of a BAPP holder since inception who is being unfairly treated by Amex which is allowing/facilitating a small minority to abuse their system to the detriment of the majority (i.e. against the consumer interest), but fortunately this may now be changing.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
When you refer to “customer fairness” it also cannot be fair to the majority of customers
The law requires suppliers be fair to customers, but not the other way round.
Ultimately Amex will be obliged to do the right thing, so enjoy the musical chairs.
BA and AMEX can only do “the right thing” in so far as that is compliant with the law. The T&Cs are unenforced so the legality of any enforcement is, unsurprisingly, untested. I can’t see Amex being able to do much more than they currently do without the help of BA, and BA are clearly completely incapable of correctly encoding lots of fairly simple business rules into their booking engine, so don’t hold your breath.
The only way it would get to the top of the list of things BA need to fix on the website would be following immense commercial pressure from Amex. The well known recent opportunities for that were when the new voucher launched (which came with the unsurprising botched IT of it’s own) and when Amex pre-purchased a few metric tonnes of Avios off of IAG mid-pandemic. No change followed either event, I guess Amex forgot to ask/insist, or they did ask and were presented with funding the actual change. I know people think this is an easy change — just check the BIN — but it’s likely that BA’s IT never “see” the BIN. Some other firm is probably handling the PCI compliant bits of the website, and they won’t want to charge anything less than the price of a new A350 for making a change to expose a previously hidden component of the card details.
Never say never, but I have a voucher with 18 months to go, and I’m far more concerned that the taxes/feees/charges mean I’ll never get to use it, rather than any possible future IT change by BA kiboshing my plans.
@memesweeper I largely agree with you that existing vouchers will be fine unless there is some manual intervention for a reissue or similar. I do think BA has a little more control over these vouchers than we think – they were quite easily able to extend them, used or unused, during covid and change their validity within FTVs and their systems can distinguish between old vouchers and the two types of new ones. BA does have an interest in keeping down the number of vouchers with access to I class availability; there was an interesting article about this by Oliver Ransome recently. If there is too much discrepancy between the expected and actual numbers and vs BAPP cardholders, they will investigate. Whatever you think of BA management, they employ super smart people in revenue management and regulation.
At the Amex end it is a little more complicated, but I made my original comment advisedly. Although it is a long term bugbear of mine, I was once in a small number of unhappy cardholders. I now understand from Amex we are relatively more numerous – the increase in fee and chatter about all this (and correspondingly higher number of people doing the dance) has prompted more people to raise the issue and the effects plus economics to be looked at. I doubt anything will necessarily happen soon, but change is a coming.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
I suspect there are many people who couldn’t hope to acquire enough avios through their normal spending for a very rare business class long haul experience (even if it is BA’s sub-par product). I for one wish one and all the very best in their gaming and researching so that they can accumulate points to enjoy something they might not otherwise get to experience. Long may it continue.
@jdb whatever your experience I strongly suspect the number of “gamers” of acquiring a voucher and then promptly cancelling is very small as a proportion of overall card holders. The BA and BAPP Amex cards are incredibly popular and the lens we see of users’ behaviour on the forums of HfP is completely unrepresentative of the majority. I couldn’t even get player 2 to believe me when I said “cancel, it will be ok” when faced with customer service pushing the alternative narrative. It’s not impossible BA / Amex will try and “fix” this, but I stand by what I said – I have far bigger concerns about my ability to actually use my orphan voucher than an effective IT change by BA. If it happens, and is judged legal, ce la vie. But it’s seriously unlikely IMHO.
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