I'm currently a silver card holder, previously a gold card holder.
With a silver card, for one year you get:
- lounge access for you and one fellow traveller, regardless of your class of travel;
- free food and drinks when you're in the lounge
- additional air miles (I think it's 25% more) on your travel
- some nice luggage tags
- a dedicated customer helpline
- (occasionally) priority boarding
- priority check-in.
Now are these benefits really worth it ?
- if you travel in business class, you get into the lounge anyway;
- if you travel by air from London regularly you'll want to spend your time at home or in the office and spend as little as possible time at the airport;
- if the airline and airport are doing things right you shouldn't need to spend much time in the lounge anyway;
- the free food and drink is fine but with BA it's the same old stuff year after year and as I said, would you prefer to spend an hour of your life at home or in the office, or in an airport lounge ?
- as others have said, the air miles aren't worth much
- it's an expensive way of getting luggage tags
- the helpline puts you on hold listening to "that music" just like the non-dedicated helplines, and often doesn't solve your problem any faster;
- priority boarding actually happens quite rarely in my experience;
- priority check-in is irrelevant if you check in online. OK it might help if you have bags to check in, but in many places you share the same bag drop queue so no difference there;
So my judgement is that it's not worth it. If you're travelling frequently enough to reach the 600 points comfortably then you might as well have one, but if not I wouldn't bust a gut trying to get one.
13Alpha
