The British Airways Avios devaluation has come and gone and much to everyone’s relief the damage is relatively minor.
Last month, we covered the news of an impending British Airways Avios devaluation affecting redemptions on partner airlines from the 30th May 2019. This has now come into effect, while as expected, redemptions on British Airways and other IAG airlines have remained unchanged.
What has changed?
Flyertalk member KARFA spent considerable time piecing together the new award rates in this useful table:
Was an Avios devaluation inevitable?
As I said when we first covered this news, many people have been expecting some sort of devaluation for a while now. BA has been awarding some customers very generous Avios compensation for service failures and a move to dynamic pricing – where the Avios required fluctuates according to the price/route/airline – has long been anticipated.
However, this devaluation has not been a move towards dynamic pricing.
Nevertheless, as predicted, these changes have mostly been met with a certain acceptance in the hope that the devaluation is contained to partner awards and BA Avios redemptions are left unscathed in the short/medium term.
Verdict
So overall the damage wasn’t too bad and is somewhat in line with the sort of devaluations we’ve seen from Lufthansa Miles & More and Singapore Krisflyer so far this year.
As I said at the time, what was most disappointing was the manner in which these changes were communicated. Surely BA had two choices:
- Say nothing until the changes have been implemented and roll then them out with immediate effect – much like Amex did with their recent changes to sign-up bonus rules.
- Reveal an upcoming devaluation which gives members a short window to make bookings at current rates. This was what BA did in with the last big Avios devaluation in 2015.
Instead, they did neither. Their vague announcement triggered a good deal of uncertainty which for the most part turned out to be largely unwarranted but so easily could have been avoided.