British Airways Club kerfuffle over elite status
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the past few days, there has been controversy in the frequent-flyer community about the apparent extension of Silver and Gold status by BA to people who had done hardly any flying with the airline. Rob Burgess, founder of the Head for Points website, has been telling me more.
A spokesperson for IAG Loyalty, which runs the scheme for BA, said: "Due to a technical issue, some members (fewer than 1%) were incorrectly told they had retained their status, when they hadn’t earned it, or been entitled to it. Because of this, we’ll be contacting affected customers in the coming days to apologise and reinstate their correct tier.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 27th of |
| 0:09.0 | April. And rather, to my surprise, I find myself once again with friend of the podcast, Rob Burgess, |
| 0:16.9 | founder of the frequent flyer website, Head for Points. It's rather sooner than I anticipated. |
| 0:24.0 | And the reason I'm talking to Rob is that, |
| 0:27.1 | well, on his frequent flyer community, |
| 0:30.8 | there's a lot of unhappiness |
| 0:32.8 | about what British Airways, |
| 0:35.1 | in the shape of the BA Club is doing. |
| 0:39.5 | Rob, first of all, can you remind us why the BA Club itself was perhaps rather controversial |
| 0:46.5 | in the first place? |
| 0:48.5 | Yeah, I mean, fundamentally British Airways has rewarded members based on the number of flights they've taken a year |
| 0:57.0 | and the class of those flights. So you always knew if you took a certain number of return |
| 1:03.6 | flights to Athens or a certain number of business-class flights to New York or a certain number |
| 1:08.2 | of economy flights to Miami in a year, that you would get status. |
| 1:13.1 | And status is important because if you're silver, you get access to lounges, if you're |
| 1:18.4 | gold, you get many, many more benefits showered upon you, things such as being able to |
| 1:23.9 | book your seats for free, emergency exit roads for nothing. |
| 1:27.2 | Exactly. So there's lots |
| 1:28.9 | reasons why people will push for status. There was a move inside BA, which is really just copying |
| 1:35.6 | what the US airlines have been doing for a number of years, which is basically getting rid of the |
| 1:41.3 | old system. I'm just saying we're going to give status to our highest spenders, full stop. |
| 1:47.4 | It doesn't matter what class you're flying in, doesn't matter who's paying for me. |
... |
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