2,000 Free British Airway Avios (12,000 Avios If You Are Willing To Do Some Work!)

Update: FFU reader Amit found an active link to the survey that will get you another 1,000 miles!

Link to Survey

While I suspect most United States based readers of FFU are primarily members of Domestic based loyalty programs like United, American, Delta, for the sake of flexibility, it is always smart to be a member of a few international loyalty programs.

For example, in addition to the above programs, I am also a member of British Airways, Air Canada, BMI, Air France, Jet Airways, ANA, and Kingfisher. It isn’t because I ever fly these airlines; rather because in the past there have been lucrative promotions that compel me to sign up for these programs!

This was the case with BMI. A few years ago, there was a 5,000 mile sign up bonus for BMI. Although I had no plans to credit any miles to BMI,  those 5,000 miles + $50 would be enough for a domestic award flight if I ever needed to fly between any 2 cities in Europe.

Fast-forward to 2012 and BMI is getting bought by British Airways. Similar to the Continental / United merger, any miles in BMI should eventually be credited over to British Airways Avios program!

Those 5,000 BMI miles that have been sitting in my account for over 3 years now are suddenly actually useful!

If you don’t have a BMI account, you can make one here and get 1,000 BMI miles for signing up.

Once the merger between BMI and British Airways is complete, your 1,000 BMI miles should become 1,000 British Airways Avios! According to terms and conditions, the 1,000 Avois will post within 28 days of opening the account.

Once you have your BMI account, take this survey and get another 1,000 miles. The survey takes all of 1 minute to complete. Survey from miles should post within 40 days.

Link to Survey

Now here is where it gets interesting!

BMI and British Airways both allow for household accounts. If you are not familiar with household accounts, essentially it is a pool of all your family’s miles in one account (ie central bank account). For example: If 5 of your family members only have 5,000 miles each in their accounts, those miles are kind of useless. However with a household account, you can pool all those miles into one account, so now you have 25,000 miles all in one place. Extremely useful!

For this BMI promotion, if you had a “family” that all had different email addresses but the same mailing address, you could hypothetically sign up them up for a new BMI account and get 1,000 miles per an account, then take the survey and get another 1,000 miles.

When the merger between BMI & British Airways is complete, you should once again be able to link all the “family” accounts back together.

From my research, British Airways allows a maximum of 6 “family” members in a household account.

Also to avoid having any issues creating a household account, I suggest using a common last name and a common mailing address when creating “family” members for a household account.

I had problems in the past transferring miles between Starwood accounts when both accounts didn’t have a common last name.

1,000 BMI Miles + 1,000 Miles From The Survey X 6 New Accounts = 12,000 Free British Airway Avios

-Parag