What is a British Airways ‘Family & Friends’ list?

How does a British Airways ‘Family and Friends’ list work?  And how do you create a BA ‘Family and Friends’ list?  Today I thought I’d take a look.

I wrote a Head for Points article recently on how to set up a British Airways household account.

Household Accounts have obvious benefits, allowing the Avios points from your entire family to be used for a single redemption.  However, a BA household account used to come with a massive caveat – if you had one, you could never redeem for anyone outside your Household Account.

For many people, this was not a problem.  For me, it was a massive deal breaker.  I regularly redeem tickets for my parents in law in Germany or other extended family members.  A few years ago I booked a seat at a few hours notice for a relative in Canada whose daughter had become seriously ill whilst travelling in Venice.  I want that flexibility.

The ‘Family and Friends’ list is BA’s attempt to solve this problem.

A ‘Family & Friends’ list allows members of a British Airways Executive Club household account to book tickets for people who are not in the household account, as long as they are on the ‘Family & Friends’ list.

How do British Airways ‘Family & Friends’ lists work?

This is how it is described by BA.  Go to ba.com, click on Executive Club and then Household Accounts.  You will come to this page.  Scroll down and you will see a reference to ‘Family & Friends’.

This is how BA describes it:

Once you have a Household Account, you can create a list of family and friends, so you can spend your Household Avios on more people who are important to you, and who don’t live at the same address as you.

There is then a link which allow you to create a ‘Family & Friends’ list.

There is a long T&C’s on ba.com, but I have distilled it for you:

You can have five people on your Family & Friends list

A person cannot be removed from your Family & Friends list until they have been on it for six months

Only the head of the Household Account can add or remove people from the Family & Friends list.  This means that you can only have one Family & Friends list per household account, rather than per person.

You need the full name, date of birth and an email address to add someone to your Family & Friends list

Overall, this is a massive improvement to how Household Accounts work with British Airways and they deserve credit for implementing it.  Household Accounts now look a lot more attractive for most people than they did.

What is the British Airways ‘Travel Companions’ list?

At the same time as they launched ‘Family & Friends’, British Airways also brought in an online ‘Travel Companions’ list.

If you regularly book revenue or award tickets for someone, you can now store their details online.  This will make it substantially quicker to make repeated bookings.  This has no impact on your Household Account or ‘Friends & Family’ list.

Again, this is a simple improvement to ba.com but one which should save some people a lot of time.

(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.