The Points Decoded

How to earn British Airways status on purpose, and how to tell when it isn't worth it. 96 pages on tier points under The British Airways Club.

On 1 April 2025, British Airways stopped counting flights and started counting money.

Almost everything written about tier points before that date is now wrong, and a great deal of what has been written since is a lightly edited version of the old thing. You can still find guides telling you which booking class to pick. Booking class has not mattered for eighteen months.

Here is what the new system looks like in practice.

A £72 return to Madrid earns seventeen tier points. The £95 fare, on the same flight, on the same day, earns 190. Same seat, same journey, eleven times the status, for twenty-three pounds. Nobody at British Airways is hiding this. It simply falls out of how the maths now works, and once you can see it you can see it everywhere.

This is a working guide to earning status in The British Airways Club, written for people who fly British Airways a handful of times a year and would like to stop guessing.

It assumes nothing. It starts with how a tier point is actually calculated, which takes about two pages and which almost nobody can do correctly, and it ends with six worked examples of real people deciding whether to chase a tier.

It isn't a list of loopholes, and it will not tell you that points are magic.

It also isn't for everyone. If you already know the current rules inside out and read frequent flyer forums for pleasure, you will find the first third slow. And if you fly British Airways once a year, the honest answer is that status is probably not for you, which the book says on page one rather than three hundred words into a sales pitch.

There is a free audit on this store called The Free Points Audit, covering seven things that cost people tier points, all of them free to fix. If you have not read it, start there. It will tell you whether this book is for you, and it costs nothing to find out.