Even in its name, British Airways has always had a doubt about who their program is aimed at: “Executive Club.”

In April, we will get used to the new name “The British Airways Club” – but at least as far as the elite qualification is concerned, the program will likely cater more to executives: Qualification will be based on revenue and in order to achieve Silver status – which notably grants access to oneworld lounges – you need to spend 7,000 GBP (before taxes and fees) each year with British Airways, American Airlines or Iberia, which likely translates to a customer price of around 8,000 GBP.

Of course, that’s no longer within everyone’s reach. Other partner flights still count towards status qualification, but with them alone, one is unlikely to achieve the status.

The alternative: more traditional programs within the oneworld alliance, with which one can achieve status with significantly lower expenses.

For Avianca’s lifemiles members, 2025 starts off well as the program has introduced unilateral improvements.
Members now receive significantly more (revenue-based) miles on all fares on Avianca flights, including for the first time miles at the cheapest Basic/Light fares. On the other end of the scale, the credits in Business Class have been increased from 7 miles to 10 miles per USD.

If this motivates you to engage more with the Star Alliance program in 2025, the promotion for purchasing miles running until January 31 might be of interest, where the program is traditionally always aggressive: For each purchase, you receive a bonus of at least 110%, which increases to 160% starting from the purchase of 36,000 miles. Such a bonus can make purchasing miles definitely worthwhile.

If you are planning flights with Emirates or FlyDubai until March 23, you should book them by January 24 to secure a good start to the New Year as a Skywards member.

For all these flights, you earn double miles.

After the recent changes, the Skywards program has become more interesting for reward flights in Economy Class, but significantly less so for reward flights in Business or First Class. Double miles on one or two flights will at least partially compensate for this, but certainly not entirely.

So far, six airlines use the shared Avios currency for their frequent flyer programs. In addition to the founders British Airways and Iberia, these now include the programs of Qatar Airways, Finnair, Aer Lingus, and Vueling.

The advantage of this common currency is notably that it can be transferred between the various Avios programs for free, allowing one to benefit from the best reward opportunities in the programs, as there are still differences on the reward side.

To these companies, an unexpected one will be added in the coming months: the relatively small regional Scottish airline Loganair, which will hence be basing its Clan Loganair on Avios, too.

The small program is unlikely to enter into direct partnerships with the other companies, but the currency will – at least for occasional Loganair customers – certainly become more useful like that.

If you, as a SkyMiles member, are using the partnership with Lyft, you are probably doing so more out of habit than conviction: Since the start of this partnership in 2017, the SkyMiles program has devalued to such an extent that as a Lyft customer, you simply have other, more rewarding accrual options.

But by April 07 at the latest, you will be forced to change these habits, as Delta will then be exchanging its riding partner to team up with Uber. The same considerations apply here, and as with Uber’s other Frequent Flyer partnerships, collecting points will likely only be possible locally, i.e. in the USA, and possibly not even for external visitors who do not use the US version of the Uber app.