London to Sofia in BA Business for €387: The Classic Tier-Point Run Is Dead
Markus Neubauer · 2026-03-04
Sofia was the textbook BA tier-point run for a decade. Under revenue-based earning a €387 Club Europe fare yields roughly 250–300 points plus bonus — and the run economy it anchored is gone.
For years, London–Sofia was the first route anyone learned when they discovered tier-point runs: cheap Club Europe, fixed points per sector, Silver assembled out of weekend hops. That world ended in April 2025, and this fare is the clearest way to show what replaced it.
What €387 earns now
British Airways awards tier points on its own flights by money spent: one point per pound of fare and carrier-imposed charges, taxes excluded. A €387 return converts to roughly £330 gross — strip taxes and you are looking at about 250–300 tier points, plus the Club Europe cabin bonus BA introduced in its 2026 bonus table. Against thresholds of 3,500 for Bronze and 7,500 for Silver, this trip is seven or eight percent of Bronze. The pre-2025 version of this article claimed 280 points against a 600-point Silver; the ratio, not just the numbers, has collapsed.
Is there any reason left to book it?
As a run, no — flying to Sofia for the points is now like photocopying banknotes. As a fare, still yes: €387 buys lounge access, a blocked middle seat, and a civilised weekend in one of Europe’s most underrated capitals, and the points that come with it are simply proportional to the money — no better, no worse. If your goal is status, the arithmetic has moved to long-haul partner fares at percentage-of-miles rates; Sofia is a nice place, not a strategy.
What “underrated” actually looks like
Underrated is doing a lot of work in that last line, so here is the specific version: Sofia is a city where renovating the metro kept turning up Roman ruins, so instead of paving over them the Serdika metro station now runs straight through an open-air museum of the ancient city of Serdica — mosaic floors and foundation walls, lit and signed, that commuters walk past on the way to a train. It is the kind of layered, unbothered history that better-photographed capitals charge admission for.