What are the benefits of joining British Airways Executive Club?

Today I wanted to explain the benefits of joining British Airways Executive Club.  The Executive Club is free to join, of course, so you’ve nothing to lose by not joining!

Executive Club is British Airways’ frequent flyer program, allowing you to collect and save Avios, the British Airways reward currency.

Once you’re signed up, you can start collecting Avios both from British Airways and oneworld alliance partner flights – including American Airlines, Qantas, Qatar Airways and Cathay Pacific.

Executive Club also has a large network of commercial partners including retailers and restaurants where you can conveniently earn on your daily spending. As a member you’ll also receive exclusive offers and competitions from both British Airways and their partners. Here’s a list of Executive Club hotel partners, for example, and here are the shopping partners.

What can you do with Avios?

Once you save enough Avios, you can spend them with British Airways by booking reward flights or part-paying cash bookings with Avios to reduce the fare, making your next flight more affordable. 

You can also upgrade your class of travel – for example from economy to premium economy, or premium economy to business. There are also options for spending on hotels, car rental bookings, wine and insurance, or even converting your Avios into Nectar points.

With just a couple of flights or your daily spending you could easily save yourself some money in the future and, since joining the Executive Club is free, there’s no way you could lose out.

There are additional benefits to joining British Airways Executive Club, particularly if you are a regular flyer. For every flight you take with British Airways or its partners, as well as earning Avios, you’ll also earn tier points. Unlike Avios, you can’t spend tier points. However, they do determine your elite status with Executive Club.

There are four tiers within British Airways Executive Club each with its own level of rewards and benefits, including lounge access, priority check-in, free seat selection and more.  We wrote this article explaining how the different Executive Club tiers work.

When you first join Executive Club you will have Blue membership.  Your first milestone, in addition to collecting Avios, should be to achieve Bronze status – the first of the elite levels – which has several benefits including priority boarding and free earlier seat selection. We’ve written about what it takes to become an Executive Club Bronze member and this page of the BA site shows what benefits you would get if you got promoted.

(This article is part of our ‘BA Q&A’ series which explains how British Airways Executive Club works.  You can see all of our ‘BA Q&A’ articles here. )

(Head for Points is the UK’s biggest frequent flyer website with 2.4 million monthly page views.  Want to learn more about earning and spending Avios?  Click here to read our latest news stories and click here to join the mailing list for our weekly or daily email newsletters.)

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (January 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital On Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

There are also good bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These are available to sole traders as well as limited companies.

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.