V-Flyer

BA's new Chase Visa reward card is getting incredible press in the US.

seems you get up to 100,000 miles fairly easily, 50k first purchase, 50k for another $2000 purchase, and then - get this - if you spend $30,000 in the year, a companion reward flight voucher, which gives you a companion ticket for whatever class you redeem miles to fly on. benefits are $1 = 1.25 miles, whereas VS is $1 = 1.5 miles.

so spend $30,000 in first year, and you get 137,500 BA miles AND a companion reward flight - good for two very tasty =UC flights.

spend that same $30,000 on your VS card and you'll have 45,000 VS miles, not even enough for a single PE ticket!

two recent effusive commentators:

http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/ ... s-ever/?em

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/viewfromt ... rom-there/

VS had better 'step up to the plate', or my spending is going to BA for this from here on... and I'm a GC member who flies/spends quite a lot - the sort of person you dont want wandering off to sample BA's services.




Thread moved to cards forum by mod........Nick

Shame the t&c's specify a permanent US address!

Another indicator that BA is really struggling at the moment.
The strike threat seems to be really hurting their bookings.

Well, BA pretty much killed its US pipeline by making it really difficult to align with them as an occasional AA customer, and pulling its US-specific version of Exec Club in the early 2000s. They pretty much told me they did not value my business at a time when my flying definitely wasn't all Club ... now that I bring more rev per mile, they are absolute last on my list. This kind of one-off bribe isn't going to change my perception of them.

If you're applying for the VS card from scratch, you get a nice bonus, admittedly not as good, but we'll see if that changes at all. And you get tier points, which makes it a cinch on enough travel to make *A gold on top of VS Gold, for example, which frankly is pretty useful if you are US-based. With CO you might even get to Plat with the right combo of flights and offers.

As a US-based FF, I'm all about tier points, EQMs and elite statuses. Mileage flows freely once you have that. To get me to even think of BA as anything more than a non-entity they would have to rethink their approach to status, and the way they share FF privileges with AA. 100k miles isn't going to do it, you can earn it in two months with a UA card and a couple of Intl flights. I'm sure lots of folks shudder at the thought of giving regular business to CO, AA or UA, but clearly US folk aren't going with BA anymore, and this is a big market. I doubt this will really change things all that much, not for those of us around long enough to remember how we got the shaft before.