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Steal one? It’s always an option, but I doubt it would end well. Right now, I think the cheapest way to get a British Airways Concorde Room Card, is to take advantage of the excellent Club Europe fares currently available. It would involve A LOT of flying, but could cost considerably less than you might assume.
I also want to start this post by explaining this is just a bit of fun for a Saturday morning. It is not a serious suggestion – particularly given the difficulties involved with travel right now.
What is a British Airways Concorde Room Card?
Basically, it’s a card that allows you to access BA’s best lounges (The Concorde Rooms, at London Heathrow and New York JFK) regardless of where, or what class, you are flying in. Apart from Concorde cardholders, only passengers travelling in First Class can access the Concorde Room lounges.
It normally requires 5,000 Tier Points to get one, but the requirement has been reduced to 3,750, in line with the 25% reduction of all status thresholds.
On the way to 3,750 Tier Points, you would also receive:
- A voucher that you and a companion can use towards an upgrade to the next cabin of your choice
- 2 Gold Upgrade for one vouchers which you can use for yourself or travel with a companion.
- Two Executive Club Silver Partner Cards and one Gold Partner Card, that you can gift to friends/family
How to get a British Airways Concorde Room Card (relatively) cheaply…
There are plenty of excellent Club Europe fares at the moment, including destinations that earn 160 Tier Points (like Malta, Istanbul, Reykjavik and Bucharest) for well under £200 return.
To hit the 3,750 Tier Point threshold would require 23 return trips, plus a single one way trip.
The very cheapest destination is Sofia, where dates are available for just £144.81 return!
23.5 return trips would therefore set you back about £3,400, but we can actually reduce that by quite a lot!
When calculating cost, it is reasonable to also take into account the value of the Avios you will earn from the flights too. As a rule of thumb, Avios are worth about 1p each.
- A BA Executive Club member with no status would earn 3,798 Avios for a return flight to Sofia in Club Europe. At a value of 1p per Avios, that is worth roughly £38.
- After completing your second trip, you would already have Bronze status. Therefore, you would receive a 25% Avios bonus on your third flight. This means that you would earn 12,343 Avios in total from your first three flights.
- For the next 4.5 return flights, you would have Silver status and receive an Avios bonus of 50%, therefore earning 25,636 Avios in total for them.
- For all the rest of the remaining 16 return trips, you would have Gold status, and benefit from a 100% Avios bonus. Each return would earn 7,596 Avios, so 121,536 in total.
Add all the above together, and your total Avios haul would be 159,515 Avios – worth £1,595.
Subtract £1,595 from your out of pocket cost of £3,400 and your ‘net’ cost to get a British Airways Concorde Card would be £1,805!
If you are unsure about whether it is fair to value Avios at 1p each, it is worth noting that on these actual London-Sofia Club Europe flights, you can redeem 3,000 Avios to knock £30 off:
Bottom line
As I said at the beginning, I’m not seriously suggesting this would be a good use of anyone’s time or money in reality. I’ve been to the Concorde Room and (aside from the excellent Laurent Perrier Grand Siecle), it’s nothing special. It’s also currently still closed due to COVID-19…
It is interesting though to know that for a net cost of ~£1,800, it is possible to take 23.5 trips in Club Europe, earn a number of upgrade vouchers, Gold status for a friend, Silver status for two friends, and a Concorde Room Card for yourself!
If anyone is genuinely tempted after reading this, I can only apologise 😉
With some crazy ba fare prices around for the foreseeable future, the whole 1p an avios point worth is probably a bit over priced I think. There has been uk to us club world returns for less than £900.
Cash is king as always, how about reducing the price of gold or gold club down by using the avios earned on each flight to part pay. On the SOF runs that could bring them down to £100 and less as you progressed up the tiers.
I’m sympathetic in principle on the 1p Avios point, but specifically in this example you could save £30 for 3k Avios on these flights,so it seemed a reasonable valuation in context.
Would be interested in seeing what the cheapest long haul option works out to be.
Outside of mistake fares, I think it’d be very tough to get close. For example, the current Finnair deal from Oslo to Bangkok (https://insideflyer.co.uk/2020/09/900-finnair-business-class-to-asia-until-next-summer/) would net 360 TPs and 13,500 Avios (for a non status member) for £900.
For a Gold, that would be 27k Avios, bringing the net cost down to £630.
You’d need to take 11 of those returns to get above 3750 TPs, so approx £7k total.
What could be potentially interesting is some sort of Qatar and/or AA run that had lots of connections that are just over the distance thresholds for higher TPs. I’m not convinced it would really work out better value, but might at least be more interesting than going to Sofia 23.5 times!
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect it to be nearly as cheap… but still probably preferable to 23x Club Euro runs.
At least you could get some sleep!
Very true!
You can check Srilankan mileage run DXB/AUH – CMB – CGK rt with 560 TPs for cca 660 GBP. Still alive in 2021.
Not bad at all – certainly a bit more variety.
Would this card be for life?