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For as long as we can remember one of the biggest complaints about the BA Executive Club is the rule that allows Silver and Gold Executive Club members to bring only one guest into the lounges.
The biggest irritation is when an Executive Club member is travelling on their family holiday and cannot bring their whole family into the lounge.
BA has sought to address this in the past 12 months by allowing Gold cardholders to bring up to five guests into the Galleries Club lounges at Gatwick and Heathrow over Christmas and Easter.
BA has, once again, relaxed access lounge access rules from today, Saturday 14 July, to Sunday 2 September 2018.
However, there is good news and bad news.
The good news is that the rules appear to have been relaxed for all BA lounges.
The bad news is that rules have been relaxed only for members of the “Gold Guest List”.
The Gold Guest List is an Executive Club tier above Gold introduced a little over ten years ago. It is not that widely publicised. You have to earn 5,000 tier points in one year to become a member and 3,000 tier points in consecutive years to retain membership. Its benefits include access to a dedicated customer service telephone line, additional Avios redemption benefits, additional lounge guests, and a Hilton Honors Diamond membership.
Given the change of policy for the summer it’s not certain how this will be applied over Christmas.
This is one of a number of measures BA has introduced for families including “status hold” for new parents. If you’ve travelled through Terminal 5 recently you may have noticed a new family check-in area at the North side of the terminal. Certainly from anecdotal experience, even for the most frequent flyers, it is the experience when travelling with their own family that has the greatest influence on their perception of the airline.
