BA has relaunched its OnBusiness programme (a scheme for small and medium enterprises to earn points for their employees travel) and has switched it to a fully revenue based method of earning points.

Members should by now have received an email with new account information and whilst logins stay the same, you are forced to enter a new password. In addition the system now prompts for a VAT number, although you can add this later.

When logging in you are shown your OnBusiness Tier – based on spend – as well as you year to date earnings:

 

The system seems to calculate spend based on the full value of a ticket, even if it is not all BA operated nor booked via them. If this is correct then it is quite generous.

You can also see your statement of recent transactions:

 

You can click in to the detail of each flight to see how BA has worked out the earnings:

 

The transaction above would have earned 60 points in the old scheme, which would have been doubled on conversion. The ticket shown was an American Airlines tickets (001-235…) and only a tiny amount of the £1,198.23 has been credited to BA’s flight from London City to Dublin.

You can now book flights and upgrades directly from the OnBusiness site when you are logged in. There are two options:

 

Checking for an upgraded ticket from Dublin to LA in August there was excellent availability for the upgrade – better than when using Avios. This seemed to be the way scheme used to operate so it’s good news that greater availability continues:

 

 

However, the upgrade request didn’t pick anywhere near the cheapest fare.

 

Availability for flights in Europe was excellent on most dates I checked and you can mix Club Europe and EuroTraveller segments – as shown.

 

A new option for OnBusiness users is that you can forego earning OnBusiness points and instead take a discount. Interestingly this works from even the cheapest sale fares as illustrated by this example. Whilst the Dublin to LA came out at £5,681 using the booking system to look for the cheapest Business Class fare:

 

Applying the discount (5%), and giving up the OnBusiness points showed:

 

In truth the discount probably has more value for very small businesses than the points do!

So the relaunch seems to have happened without a technical hitch and I look forward to spending my remaining points and then hanging around for the discounts. Redemptions in Business and First class tickets is much more expensive now so I will be using them for European short trips, as shown with the example for Berlin.