Update: Travel Update is reporting that their miles were removed from the British Airways account after transferring. British Airways claims this because the account is inactive so the miles automatically expire (transferring doesn’t count as the account being active). It seems like purchasing something through the British Airways shopping portal first should prevent this from happening but YMMV. Considering Iberia/British Airways allowed the transfers in the first place due to the negative tabloid piece coming out I’m hopeful that if we can get enough bad press these types of transfers made in good faith will be honored.
Original post: Earlier this year Iberia ran a generous promotion offering 9,000 Iberia Avios per flight booked. The promotion was extremely weird/generous in that you didn’t need to actually fly the flight to get the miles. People were able to book extremely cheap flights to effectively purchase the miles at a low low cost. The downside is that the miles expire this December and originally were not transferable to British Airways.
It looks like Iberia is set to back track on this last restriction and allow transfers to British Airways. According to Raffles on Flyertalk this is because Iberia is trying to get ahead of a story that will be published in the Sunday edition of U.K. tabloid ‘The Mail’. The terms of the original promotion stated:
If the customers transfer these Avios to their BA Executive Club account, they will have a negative balance in the Iberia Plus programme, as those Avios wouldn’t have been spent by the date mentioned above.
Despite this the points weren’t/aren’t transferable at all. Iberia plans to allow transfers, but users doing so will still end up with a negative balance in the Iberia Plus programme as per the original stated terms. My recommendation would be to not do a points transfer unless absolutely necessary. Even if you plan to never use Iberia Plus again, it’s impossible to know if another promotion like this will come along or another opportunity. By transferring you’re going to end up with a massive negative balance of up to 90,000 points. Another worry is what happens when Iberia & British Airways combine into the same Avios program, I assume the negative balance will transfer over as well.
That being said if you won’t be able to use the Iberia Points before the December deadline then I’d absolutely transfer them if you’ll be able to use the British Airways Avios. Keep in mind you’re Iberia account needs to be at least 90 days old to use the ‘Combine My Avios’ feature.
Hat tip to Head For Points
