British Airways Fuel Surcharge Class Action Lawsuit Avios Posted

British Airways just made Avios deposit to my Executive Club account with a description “Avios Adjustment – Dover v BA Settlement Avios Compensation”.

The airline had been accused since 2006 collecting fuel surcharges that didn’t have any correlation on the price of the fuel itself. You can access my previous pieces on this class legislation case here and here.

Here’s the link to the class action lawsuit settlement website.

UPDATE: Here’s an email that just came from BA:

Here’s what I wrote earlier about this subject:

The email contains the identifier that you can use to check how many Avios or cash you can expect to get out from this settlement.

You need to plug that to the website.

Seems that I only redeemed once during this period and thus only eligible for 12,500 Avios of 16.9% of the fuel surcharge back that I had paid.

I quickly went through the court document below that you can find from the website above. The are total of 168,259 members in this class and 23% of those are former meaning BA no longer have their information on file.

Former members won’t get anything unless they fill out the form on the class action website.

Members redeemeed total of 605,920 tickets over the six year period on 38,771 routes and paid total of $160M in fuel surcharges.

Members that redeemed once will get 12,500 Avios, those that redeemed 2 to 5 times will get 20,000 Avios and members who redeemed 6 times or more 35,000.

The maximum number of Avios that BA will place to the accounts of active members is 2,228,688,500 depending on how many will elect the cash instead. The payout per active member is on average 17,202 Avios.

Download (PDF, 174KB)

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Conclusion

So, British Airways was forced to issue more than 2,000,000,000 (that is two billion) Avios for class members who are still active in the Executive Club if all elected to miles instead of cash.

The cash option was much better for some that had issued number of tickets on British Airways and thus eligible for much higher payment than the maximum Avios deposit under this settlement that was capped at 35,000.

I just wish that these fuel/carrier surcharges would just go away (as well as the resort/destination scam fees collected by hotels). There is just no justification for them beyond robbing consumers and partners.

Let’s see what will come out from the BA data leak/hack lawsuit that is brewing at the moment. Can we expect some Avios in the future too or cold hard cash?