Key link: British Airways Visa: up to 100,000 point signup bonus
The most lucrative credit card bonus this year gets pulled July 18.
The offer is:
- 50,000 points after first purchase
- 25,000 points after spending $10,000 on the card within a year
- 25,000 additional points after spending the next $10,000 on the card within that year
There’s a $95 annual fee, spending earns 1.25 points per dollar, and the card has no foreign currency transaction fees.
After $30,000 in spend within a year they award a free companion award ticket – the second passenger travels on an award booked on British Airways flights for no additional points (though both passengers are charged taxes and fuel surcharges). And of course there are plenty of ways to goose your spending to get there.
(There’s also good discussion in the comments to this post about how to get the offer without having to make the minimum spending, although you have to wait a full year to get the second half of the points and which triggers a second annual fee.)
Keep in mind that you can pool points between members at the same address. This means that the British Airways Visa signup bonus really leverages up by allowing multiple family members to get the card and combine bonuses towards one person’s award. A husband and wife each get the card, and get two bonuses. Get kids or parents involved and pool the bonus points as well. It’s 50,000 points after first purchase so even if you aren’t going to meet the spend requirement for 100,000 points, two people getting the card will still get 100,000 miles and those can be used for one award if you wish.
Those that do put $30,000 spend on the card within a year will earn the companion award ticket, so you get to spend those pooled points twice (for two passengers on the same award itinerary).
Given fuel surcharges, some folks think of it as buying a discounted, non-points earning coach ticket and having a confirmed upgrade. Since BA is a 4-class airline, in the case of a first class award, that’s a confirmed three-cabin upgrade.
The British Airways card is clearly a card that most folks should grab for the signup bonus. At up to 100,000 points on offer, it’s the most lucrative signup bonus out there. By a wide margin, in my opinion. And they’ve let us know exactly how long we have to get that bonus. There’s just one week left.
Bear in mind, 100,000 points is enough for business class travel from the US to London (some cities in the US it’s less than 100,000). It’s also enough for two passengers to fly roundtrip in business class from New York or Miami non-stop to most cities in South America (without fuel surcharges).
This is a great example of how a credit card and some focused spending can send you off in a premium class of service.
(I do receive referral credit if you use my link for the British Airways Visa, and I appreciate it greatly.)
At 13k with 5 months left, with rent, Amazon payments and maybe that MileValue Vanilla Card thing, should be doable, but a warning, this will eat up all your availables if you are a regular guy, so i can’t see myself getting any other cards with even small minimum spending – like $1500 or $2500 within 3/4 months – so be careful.
I thought one could redeem Avios points with Open skies. But when I searched on BA.com, no Open skies flights came up even though Expertflyer.com shows award seats availability. Do you have any thoughts please? thank you.
@WT you can definitely redeem on OpenSkies, you may need to call, don’t ever rely on BA.com…
Anyone know if the ‘other’ chase BA 100k offer (hold it for a year, get 2x50k) will last after July 18?
@Steve – It is a mistake that it’s even still out there, the woman running the BA card for Chase wasn’t even aware that the offer was still out there at the end of last month (I was standing within earshot when someone else was asking her about it). That offer was added for testing, but she thought it had been removed. So it could go away TODAY or it could go on some other time, it’s not on a schedule, it’s a mistake, and we can’t say exactly the deadline.
GARY, so i just want to confirm. Lets say instead of my mother and grand mother giving me and my wife $$$ for xmas and b-days could I have them get this card instead and pool the miles into my BA account? If so is the only requirement that their BA account match my address? Thanks!
@troy bingo — though the miles don’t literally go into your account, you can combine miles from their accounts for a single award ticket
Ok thanks Gary, so their miles will be in their BA accounts but they will be linked/pooled to my account somehow for the family. Can I be in control of all the accounts?
@Troy when it comes time to redeem, it’s no problem for you to redeem the miles for all the accounts once you have linked them into a household account. Say you needed 150,000 miles for an award, there are 50,000 miles in each account, you just book the award for yourself and BA will automatically draw the miles from all 3 accounts. Do note that only members of the household can have award tickets issued for them once a household account is created. If you want to redeem miles for a 4th person, they need to join the household (or you can dissolve the household account and then redeem YOUR miles for that 4th person)
Any indications on whether this offer will be available next year? I was planning on signing up for the card on 1/1/13 to maximize the time allotted for the 30k calendar year spend.
Also, are the two 25k spending bonuses for spend within a calendar year, or within 12 months from when you get the card?
@paa the spend bonuses are within 12 months, not calendar year. No way to know what the plans are for 2013 on this card, I doubt Chase has any idea themselves at thispoint.
Has anyone gotten the “other” offer lately? After a lot of failed attempts I finally learned how to apply for the unofficial offer, including not putting my BA member number on the app, and got approved last month. I didn’t apply for my wife at the time, as she had just done a Chase app. The last couple of days I’ve tried to get her the “other” card, thinking it might expire when the official offer does, and I can’t seem to find it now. Has anyone gotten this in the last few days, or is it fini? I don’t want to give up if it’s still out there, but I also don’t want to waste more time if its gone…
My wife applied for the other BA bonus at the end of June. After Gary’s response to my earlier question I checked it out. The offer was still there for me at 4 pm edt.
I’m planning on applying for it soon.
Gary – I cancelled my old Chase BA card in September 2010 – about 22 months ago. Do you know if this card is churnable and if so how often?
@Erik J – there are some folks who have had success in similar situations, too few data points to answer with certainty though
@Steve: Thanks for the update, I’ll try again.