Link: British Airways Visa with up to 100,000 point signup bonus

Last week I wrote about Chase bringing back the 100,000 point signup bonus offer on the British Airways Visa.

It requires more spending to get the full 100,000 points than last time — 50,000 points after first purchase, 25,000 additional points after $10,000 in spend within a year, and 25,000 more points after the next $10,000 in spend within a year (ie after $20,000 in spend on the card yields 100,000 points). There’s a $95 annual fee, not waived the first year.

It’s the best current credit card signup bonus out there, but the hefty spending requirements have led some commenters and some other blogs to downplay it, calling it ‘just’ a 50,000 point signup bonus.

I’m going to beg to differ, and hope to show you how you can turn this card hugely to your advantage.

In future posts I’ll write more about ways to help meet the minimum spending requirements on the card.

In this post I’ll focus on the huge value that many other folks have been missing.

1. British Airways offers household accounts that let you pool your points, so more than one person can sign up for the card and then share the bonuses for a single award ticket.
2. This card comes with a “free companion award ticket” after $30,000 in spend in a calendar year. That means the points you have in your account can be effectively used twice provided two passengers are traveling on the same award itinerary on British Airways.

With 50,000 – 100,000 points as a signup bonus, and two opportunities for leverage this is actually a really huge offer.

Household accounts let you pool points with up to 7 other people at the same residential mailing address. The only meaningful restriction here is that once you set up a family account, points have to be redeemed for one of the members of that family account. So if seven people join, awards must be issued for one of those seven people.

Two spouses could each sign up for the card and after first purchase there would be 100,000 points available to pool. That’s enough points for a business class ticket roundtrip from the US West Coast to London or roundtrip from New York to Buenos Aires.

Spouses and each of their two parents could sign up for the card, and if their British Airways accounts are at the same residential mailing address all six accounts could be pooled. That’s 300,000 bonus points.

But let’s just stick with the two-person example.

• One person gets the card and makes a single purchase. That’s 50,000 points earned.

• The second person gets the card and puts $30,000 of spend on it by the end of the year. They’ve earned the full 100,000 point bonus, and have earned 37,500 points from spending (since the card earns 1.25 points per dollar).

• In total, they’ve earned 187,500 points and a free companion award ticket.

• Both people could fly business class roundtrip from the U.S. to South Africa via London (with allowable stopover).

This is the only offer I’ve ever seen that would allow $30,000 in credit card spend to generate 2 business class award tickets to Africa.

I’m not a huge fan in general of the Avios program. And like most non-US frequent flyer programs they add fuel surcharges to award redemptions (including on a companion award ticket, though not when a paid ticket wouldn’t incur such charges such as on US domestic itineraries or US-South America itineraries). But even paying slightly less than the cost of a coach ticket and getting business class is a huge reward. And the leverage opportunities really make this offer unique.

(Using my link to sign up for the British Airways Visa will generate referral credit to me, which I certainly appreciate.)