Privilege Club or BA Club to maximise TP and Avios

[Steve H]

Just booked a flight to Australia in Business, flying 24th April and return 6th May. All flights are with Qatar. Currently BA blue and so looking to achieve the highest number of Tier points to try and get close to silver. Does it make any difference whether I put my Privilege Club number or BA Club number on the booking for tier points? In a similar vein, does it make any difference for Avios? Tier points are my priority. Any advice much appreciated. Thanks.

[Rob]

Look at Iberia too – you’d get 4,000 TP for the trip.

You also need to factor in how you’d earn other TP during the year though, in terms of which scheme also makes it easier to earn the rest of what you need.

[AJA]

Where in Australia are you going? Might also be worth looking at Finnair’s scheme too unless your fare is P class as that only gets 75%. Most other fares get 125% of the miles flown. You get the same number of Avios as tier points.

That said with BA while you only get 25% of the miles flown on P R and I fares but will be at least Bronze and potentially closer to Silver (OW Sapphire) than with Finnair.

[Steve H]

Thanks. I have just checked and my Qatar flight from LGW via Doha to Sydney is all in fare code “R”. The Qatar flight back is from Melbourne via Doha to LHR and is fare type “D”. The booking currently has my BA Club number associated with it. If I understand correctly that means that I’ll get 25% of the actual miles flown to Australia and 50% coming back. So, using GC Mapper it’s approximately 25% of 9,500 miles there plus 50% of 9,300 miles back. So a total of about 7,000 tier points, is that roughly correct? If so, is there any way I can get the additional 500 or so tier points to get to that magical 7,500 for silver….? Thanks again.

[AJA]

I agree with your rough calculations – weirdly BA’s scheme gets you closest to OW Sapphire at over 93% of the threshold, albeit at the expense of Avios. Not sure what you can do to get the extra 500TP other than take another flight.

QR Privelege Club gets you only 69% of the way with 208 Qpoints and 32,349 Avios

IB comes next and gets you 62% of the way to OW Sapphire. I still don’t understand the Avios earning side of things with their scheme, particularly with non-IB operated flights.

Finnair isn’t great for QR flights. Based on just the flights you only get to 52% of target with 23,480TP but you also get 23,480 Avios as both TP and Avios are the same. The advantage with Finnair is that if you have a lot of Avios you could then sell 64,560 Avios using their scheme which allows you to exchange Avios for TP at a 3:1 ratio and get the remaining TP to get their equivalent of OW Sapphire. The caveat being that I am not sure if you can only swap Avios earned in the Finnair scheme or if you could transfer the Avios from BAEC and then do the conversion.

[Steve H]

Thanks AJA. So I phoned BA this afternoon and asked what they thought I’d get in tier points for the route and fare classes. Their answer is 7889 tier points. Not sure how they get to an extra 889, but I hope they are right! Thanks to your input and that of BA, I’m going to leave my booking linked to my BA club membership as it sounds like that will get me silver. Fingers crossed.

[Leonidasc]

Question. Are these BA codeshare flights on QR? If so, then you are entitled for the bonus TPs. So these 4 flights can you give you an extra 1600 TPs

If you haven’t registered, please do so
https://www.britishairways.com/content/the-british-airways-club/offers/tier-point-bonus