British Airways Executive Club is a unique frequent flyer program, and it has many features you won’t find with other programs. For example, British Airways has a distance based award chart, opening up some great award redemption opportunities.
One of the other cool features of the British Airways Executive Club program is the ability to pool Avios in a household account. This is potentially a great option, and can be useful whether you’re a frequent British Airways flyer, or have the British Airways Visa Signature® Card. However, there are some important limitations to be aware of, and I wanted to take a closer look at those in this post.
In this post:
Basics of British Airways household accounts
In order to let you more effectively redeem your Avios, British Airways lets you create a household account, where you can pool the Avios you earn with up to six other people registered at the same address as you.
This is especially useful for infrequent travelers. For example, if your family of five takes a long haul trip, chances are that the Avios you earn individually won’t be enough for anything great, but if you can pool your Avios, you may already have enough for a free ticket to somewhere fun.
Note that individual members will continue to earn Tier Points to their own accounts, so this doesn’t accelerate the earning of status. Rather this just fast tracks the earning of Avios, which can be redeemed for award flights and upgrades.
How to set up a British Airways household account
In order to create a household account you’ll need to decide on a “Head of Household.” This is the person who should complete the application, and then they’ll receive the communications regarding the account, and will be the only person who can add and remove people from the account (though all adult members can potentially redeem Avios from the household account).
When you create a household account, the head of household will invite members, so invited members should receive emails asking if they want to join a household account.
Avios accrued in a household account are valid as long as there’s some activity at least every 36 months (in line with the standard Executive Club expiration policy), so this makes it easier to keep Avios alive across several accounts.
There are a few other things to remember about these accounts:
- You can only redeem Avios for members of the household account or select nominated travelers (more on that below); this is the biggest restriction, as joining a household account prevents you from redeeming Avios for anyone
- You can only change the address on a household account once every six months
- When you redeem Avios from a household account, a proportional percentage of Avios will be pulled from each account in relation to the balance; in other words, if three household members had 50,000 Avios, 30,000 Avios, and 20,000 Avios, and you made a 10,000 Avios redemption, then those members would have 5,000 Avios, 3,000 Avios, and 2,000 Avios pulled, respectively
You can also create a list of family and friends
The biggest restriction on household accounts is that they limit the people you can redeem your Avios for. This is a major limitation if you’re someone who likes redeeming Avios for those not at the same address as you.
However, the good news is that there’s a way to get around this. British Airways lets you nominate up to five family and friends who you can redeem Avios from your household account for, even if they don’t live at the same address.
This means that in addition to being allowed up to seven members of the household account, you can add a further five redemption nominees.
The major restriction here is that you can’t remove someone from your family and friends list until they’ve been on there for at least six months, so you can’t constantly change these nominees.
Is a British Airways family account worth it?
In general, absolutely. I’m all for consolidating points as much as possible in order to make it easier to keep track of them and maximize redemption opportunities. By creating a household account, it becomes easier to prevent Avios from expiring, and also makes Avios easier to redeem.
With other programs, one major limitation is that you need enough points in one account to redeem for an award. That’s not a problem with British Airways Executive Club, thanks to this feature.
The only real major consideration with creating a household account is that you can only redeem your Avios for up to seven members of your household, plus up to five nominated travelers. Realistically this shouldn’t be a major issue, because that covers a lot of people. But it’s at least something to be aware of.
In the past, one other limitation was that creating a British Airways household account limited your ability to transfer Avios between accounts at no cost. I’m talking about transferring points between different flavors of Avios, like moving points to and from the Iberia Plus program.
The good news is that this is no longer an issue — nowadays you have a British Airways household account, and also transfer Avios between programs.
This allows you to maximize your rewards. For example, in addition to the excellent British Airways Visa Signature® Card (review), there’s also the Iberia Visa Signature® Card (review) and Aer Lingus Visa Signature® Card (review). You’re potentially eligible for the bonuses on all three of these cards, and you could consolidate those rewards even if you have a household account.
Bottom line
It’s great that British Airways allows household accounts, whereby you can pool the Avios earned by several people, and even nominate friends and family that you can redeem for.
This is a solid opportunity in situations where you wouldn’t otherwise have enough Avios for the redemption you want, but pooling Avios makes that possible. The only restriction to be aware of is that creating a household account limits the total number of people you can redeem your Avios for at any given point. For a vast majority of people, that shouldn’t be too restrictive.
Personally I think it’s worth being aware of household accounts, but I wouldn’t form one until you have a reason to.
Have you formed a British Airways household account, and if so, what has your experience been like?
My Avios are about to expire (as BA have kindly told me), so I have added my son to the Family & Friends extension of my Household so that he could use them with his, but I don't think that alone will extend the life of mine — is that true? If so, how can I save them, other than by earning more (not likely to fly anywhere soon enough), buying more (min. £49, so not worth it), or converting them into, say, Nectar (with a loss of value)?
I’ve had Avios expire in one account that was part of a HH, so unless the expiration policy changes, each account must have its own activity every 36 months. Also there is no way to figure out when your miles expire except by looking at your activity statement.
@Ken asked a question I have been trying to find the answer to as well.
Ben - what is the expiration policy? Does adding points to the family account reset the clock for all the members or are the members on their own for the activity (36 months)?
What's the expiration of family members avios?
It's an odd headline asking if it's "worth it". Typically that is for something with an associated cost (or opportunity cost), which this does not have. I have created and undone my household account several times (because you can't transfer miles between Avios programs if account is part of a household). It takes almost no time. It's should just be a post "All about BA family accounts".
Is this still true? The article says that it's no longer an issue to transfer between Avios programs if you have a hh account, can't find official info om this regard.
Hi Ben, Would be great if you could write a similar post about Emirates family pooling option.
Josh
Another interesting comparison would be with the family pooling option of Virgin Australia's Velocity programme, which allows pooling of both points and status credits. Velocity is a pretty niche programme, so I appreciate might be of limited interest to North American readers (although its partners do include United and Air Canada).
Family of 5 here where the kids mostly travel on award tickets, so their mileage earnings are not great. So this is a good option for us. It seems that it might make sense to credit all of their One World flights to BA, even though we're most frequently on Alaska. I'll keep crediting to AS though for better chance at status. Anyone see that differently?
Another benefit of pooling miles is that when you redeem miles for award tickets for your family, you can put them on one reservation. For example, if you have a family of four, and each person had an individual account with award balances between 70-100K each, then you could book each person a 70K award ticket, but everyone would be on separate reservations, which can cause issues in the case of IROPS and rebookings.
Meanwhile,...
Another benefit of pooling miles is that when you redeem miles for award tickets for your family, you can put them on one reservation. For example, if you have a family of four, and each person had an individual account with award balances between 70-100K each, then you could book each person a 70K award ticket, but everyone would be on separate reservations, which can cause issues in the case of IROPS and rebookings.
Meanwhile, a family account with 280K award miles would be able to put everyone on one reservation with one record locator (assuming there are 4 award seats on the flight).
"Avios accrued in a household account are valid as long as there’s some activity at least every 36 months (in line with the standard Executive Club expiration policy), so this makes it easier to keep Avios alive across several accounts."
Just to be ABSOLUTELY clear, does this mean that Avios accrued in a household account remain valid as long as there’s some activity at least every 36 months by JUST ONE member of the household...
"Avios accrued in a household account are valid as long as there’s some activity at least every 36 months (in line with the standard Executive Club expiration policy), so this makes it easier to keep Avios alive across several accounts."
Just to be ABSOLUTELY clear, does this mean that Avios accrued in a household account remain valid as long as there’s some activity at least every 36 months by JUST ONE member of the household account even if the OTHER members of the household account do nothing Avios-related for over 36 months?
No, each member still has to have their own activity every 36 months, unless (I believe) one of the members is Gold or higher (then their status prevents everyone's expiry).
Making a redemption from a HHA will count as activity for everyone though, as the Avios are drawn pro-rata from everyone's accounts.
Thanks. I think you're right - a redemption is by far and away the easiest method of ensuring that there is activity for every member of a household account.
It works for me and my wife. We use Avios awards for traveling together only and the household account makes it easy. The total sum is what interests us. I wish pooling would be as easy with some other points/miles programmes.