British Airways forced to downgrade loyalty scheme members after ‘error’
British Airways has been forced to downgrade thousand of members of its loyalty scheme, after it parent’s company rewards team incorrectly told passengers they could keep their gold or silver tier status.
The error, which IAG Loyalty pinned on a “technical issues”, comes as shake-up of the scheme is becoming disruptive for the thousands of passengers affected by the changes.
The changes to the coveted loyalty programme, which were implemented earlier this week, are designed to free up its lounges and prevent some travellers from playing the system.
The overhaul, aimed at rewarding passengers for money spent rather than distance travelled with the airline, have led to a score of travellers losing top status.
Contacting passengers
This week IAG Loyalty, the unit of BA parent IAG that manages the rewards programme, contacted several thousand members of the programme informing they would retain their prior status, despite not accumulating the right number of points.
But the unit had incorrectly told many customers they could retain their status it admitted on Friday.
The mistake affected less than one per cent of BA’s membership scheme, which has more than 13m members worldwide.
IAG Loyalty said: “Earlier this week we renewed the status of a very small number of BA Club members according to our normal guidelines and criteria.
“This raised concerns with some of BA’s members, who believed we’d made a mistake.
“Our initial investigation didn’t identify any obvious issues.
“However, over the last 24 hours we’ve conducted some more detailed forensic work, and have discovered that due to a technical issue, some members . . . were incorrectly told they had retained their status, when they hadn’t earned it, or been entitled to it.”
It added that it would be contacting affected customers in the coming days to apologise and reinstate them to their correct tier.