British Airways Amex Credit Card - Family of 4

[Lwizzer]

We are a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 kids under 5) - I am looking at getting one of the British Airways Amex credit cards to collect avios and get the companion 2 for 1 voucher. I cannot find anything online about which card is more suitable for families?

British Airways American Express Premium Plus Card (£300 annual fee)
OR
British Airways American Express Credit Card (No annual fee)

Not sure if anyone can provide any advice and guidance? Everything I'm reading online seems to suggest the paid for credit card is better value than the free one.

Thanks in advance :)

@Lwizzer , We have the black card and we put every last spend on it that we can. We’re focused on long haul in business class and the card works really well for that. We’ve got return flights for us both in business coming up to Johannesburg and for the two of us it cost £900.00 plus a fair few AVIOS. We spend roughly 50K a year on the card though. You can only use the blue card CV for economy and I think the blue card CVs only last a year whereas the black card ones last two. Trying to bag the reward flights is tough, not all that many are released, if you want CVs to cover all of you, you’d need two cards. Using the CVs on long haul is the best deal. There are Facebook groups you can join which are a wealth of information.

@Icanthinkformyselfthanks thanks so much for the response that's really helpful! Yes the black card does sound like better value having the option of business class etc but I'm wondering how that would work if we only had the 1 companion voucher and needing to book the 2 kids too 😅

Hence I was questioning myself if the basic blue card would make more sense with economy class seats - assuming we could simply just pay for the additional 2 seats for the kids.

How far in advance have you managed to bag companion voucher flights? I've read that some people literally call BA up 355 days before the flight to book using CV because they're so in demand 😩

Does the paid card accumulate points at a faster rate?

You need to work out how much you need to spend to make paying the fee worthwhile and whether you're likely to achieve this. It's no good if it you need to spend £30k pa to to be better off paying the £300 fee but you'd never spend more than £20k no matter how hard you tried.

I think these cards probably only benefit people who can put all their spends, plus likely work expenses on the card and are likely to take the flights that the vouchers can be used for and the flights are not significantly more expensive than other options, eg you don't benefit if the 2 for 1 flights cost £2k but you can buy other equivalent flights at £800 each on another airline. Plus you are able to book so far enough in advance that you'll be able to commit to and actually get what sounds like a limited resource.

None of the above applies to me, so it's not something I've ever got into and I just use a couple of basic cashback cards that gives me money or vouchers to spend however I like or in a supermarket that I use all the time.

The paid card vouchers last 2 years so as long as you qualify every year, after 2 years you’ll have 2 vouchers - 1 that’s got a few months left and 1 you’ve just earns.

Note you can’t use the voucher if you don’t keep paying for the card though regardless of the expiry date

To be honest, it’s not the best option for families unless you spend enough to get two companion vouchers plus you have enough avios to buy the non free flights. If you are only getting one voucher then you are having to buy two flights at BA prices (normally a premium). It’s much better for a couples trip. Plus you can get seats without it being a total rush 355 days in advance at school holidays.

Avios And Virgin Points UK is a really good FB group which I’d recommend. You can stack up loads of points by making purchases through the Avios shop. Eg at the moment you can get 6 points per pound on booking.com but only if you use the Avios link. Loads of other companies offer extra points. You can exchange Nectar points too. 400 nectar points equals 250 Avios points. Keep a look out for when items have got extra points or if it’s triple nectar points on a big shop.

I managed to get return economy seats to Orlando for 2 adults using a companion voucher. It was 70k points and £300. Bargain.

To answer your other question, you need to call up 355 days in advance. They only release 8 reward seats in economy and 4 in business. Those are the seats you can use your companion voucher for.

When the 355 days comes round, call
as soon as the call centre opens. You then book the outbound flight using the FULL xxx amount of Avios points and the FULL £xx of taxes for 2 x single flights to your destination.

Once your return flights are released, call up again and say you want to book the return flights but link the companion voucher so you’re getting the ‘buy one, get one free’.

Hope that helps.

For a family of four, if you are big enough spenders, you and your partner should each get your own card in your own names (NOT a secondary card on one account). You need to manage your spend across both cards until you have enough to trigger a companion voucher on each card.

the big trick is getting four seats to book…

We looked at this and decided it was going to be too difficult to access the free flights or upgrades - because there are 4 of us and we’re tied to school holidays. So we have the cashback Amex card instead.

The points card does produce significantly more points per spend than the equivalent cash from the cashback card, but that’s irrelevant if you can’t really use the points!

The other advantage of the card with the bigger fee, along with the voucher lasting longer and usable in premium cabins, is that it also gives you access to more reward seats than if you were just booking g with Avios alone. This makes it considerably easier to book reward seats. For example, we booked tow business class flights to Mauritius a couple of months ago, flying out in September. Normally the standard reward seats would have snapped up months ago. For me, this perk of the card is really good.

How does it give you access to more seats?

Avios seats for popular destinations get booked as soon as they are released. They get released at midnight and if you’re not already on the phone to book before 12 you’ve not little to no chance.

For less popular destinations or routes not so much of a problem.

we have both cards - I have the free one and earnt the voucher the first year but never used it and haven’t spent enough since. My DP has the paid one and uses it for work as well as personal spend and usually gets at least one voucher per year.

what’s the chance of you earning two vouchers a year? If not, are you prepared to stump up for two business class tickets? If not, there’s not much point in the paid card.

there is also a free avios barclaycard that gives a voucher as well.

The black card accrues points at a faster rate which is worth factoring in to your decision.

Some questions to ask yourself….
where do you really want to go? Which class? How many avios do you already have! Are you ready to plan to the point you are on the phone to a US call centre 355 days out to get the perfect flights?
Personally I think the optimum days of credit card miles are gone, and you do need to be very committed and understand what you’re getting in to.

We’ve used 2 241s to got to South Africa and Mauritius this August. You can actually cancel the card after you’ve generated the voucher but you do need another Amex to pay with.

The cost for us for 4 CW seats was 400,000 avios, £275 in credit card fees and £2200 cash for what would have been £14k seats in cash. An amazing deal but it took years of planning and coordination to get exactly what you want.

If you book with the voucher it opens up extra seat availability than the basic minimum that BA makes a to everyone. You can tell when you do a search with the voucher ticked for a particular date - the extra seats show up slightly differently. This rather lovely feature has allowed us to bag Club World reward seats to Miami and Singapore in the past.

Strange - we’re gold and never seen more availability using the voucher.

Are you saying for example, there’s no availability without the voucher ticked, when you tick the voucher then there is availability?

Yes, that is very possible. You have to have the voucher ticked when you search to see if there is any extra availablility. You can’t do that if you want to search a whole year, only for specific dates as you can’t tick the voucher when doing an annual availability search.

What this also means is that if you want to book the outbound leg first and then wait to book the inbound once the flights are released, you won’t be able to see any extra availability on the inbound flight. This is also true of call centre staff if you phone up. This doesn’t mean you can subsequently link the return flight to the original booking to get use of the voucher to save Avios on the return leg, but it does prevent you from seeing any extra availability for the return.

When we did our last three flights we booked both legs together at the same time, so could see if there was any extra availability in both directions. Clearly that is a risky strategy as any extra availability may have been already taken, but we weren’t ready to book 355 days out. It therefore made a big difference to us.

Note - being Gold makes no difference. It’s purely about the voucher.

Look at the Points Guy it does take a bit to work out.

We stack our companion vouchers as they last 2 years. It's means that you need to manage spend as they issue the voucher when you hit the spend amount.We collect points wherever we can. The amex card is in DH name and I have a card linked to that.

This means that as a family of 4 we do a points flight every 2 years - use 2 vouchers and points - so effectively get 4 flights for 2 flights points. The flight cost is the tax on the 4 flights. The difference in tax between economy and business is a few hundred pounds each so its the best way to use points. Book 355 days out when seats releases.

We're 10 years down the line experts. We always go long haul but the BA network has shrunk quite a bit so be sure there are places you want to go.

We just have the Blue card but then it’s mostly just the two of us. There are loads of routes where you don’t need to book so far in advance- Costa Rica or Malaysia for example, plus many of the US routes aren’t as popular as before. We use it either for somewhere exotic or for flights directly from our local airport. Although in truth not sure we’re actually saving loads because could go cheaper with budget airlines, but I do enjoy the whole planning and logistics element of it <weirdo>.
We are going away with adult DS this weekend and I got our flights on the companion voucher and then bought DS ticket in the Christmas sale. One of my main reasons for using the Avios flights is that I have elderly DPs, so it’s very reassuring to know I would only lose £35 per flight if we need to cancel.

I would probably go with two separate blue accounts in your situation and see how it goes. It is £15k spend per year which might be tricky on two cards although can use it for groceries and petrol - I spend like mad on it for the first few months, and now am drip feeding through so we have the maximum time to use the voucher.

I get extra Avios by doing surveys on Avios for Thoughts and we watch out for Avios offers to get extra points on booking.com and wine purchases.

DH and I have a card each so we get two companion vouchers per year. We have the premium card as we like to travel in business (and premium as a minimum). It can be tricky to get flights in school holidays but, if you’re flexible about destination, there’s usually something available. I booked four business class flights to Boston for this summer in March and there was still quite a lot available for that route.

My partner has the normal Amex card, most recently we used it to go to Antigua. Use of companion voucher and points meant that our £1600 flights were £300 total out of pocket. We booked directly with the resort we were going to and had much better deal overall that if we booked a package (the resort was available to book via BA).
For us this works reasonably well and it's worth it but we don't use every single companion voucher as we like to go on different holidays and cruises so we only use vouchers half of the time.
I have no idea how this works with kids, everyone else that I know is doing the same are child free like us.
The annoying thing is that Amex is not wildly accepted (we live rural) in shops etc so we mostly use it online and definitely missing out on collecting more points, if you live in big city this may be much easier.
Also we can't really upgrade when using companion vouchers which we would like to on some long haul flights. Especially when the 1st class is empty, they should just make it possible to pay the difference and upgrade.
I never even considered getting Amex as it's just annoying to use and it's always necessary to carry another card with you because you constantly hear 'sorry, we don't accept Amex'. But it does the job and we use it strategically to rack up point if we fancy long haul hols.
Last point is that I personally don't massively like flying with BA, so I try not to do it too often. They are trying very hard to be fancy but some of the dirtiest and most dilapidated planes I've been in were BA (plus Heathrow Terminal 5, if you know you know).

It’s true @VeronicaRaven the BA long haul planes are awful, particularly in economy, the seat space is shocking compared to say the same class in Qatar. Our flight back ended up delayed by a full 24 hours because it was too dilapidated to fly, mind you then we got the compensation of £520 each and our expenses paid so I didn’t mind too much.

Wow that's bad (and good because of the compensation). But imagine if you needed to be somewhere on time. 24hrs is a lot. Also I didn't like the food, I flew long haul with TUI and the food was much better 😂

If you need to be back, insist they fly you back on another airline and they have to do it.