UKC

Not sure which forum to put this in but since I use my BMC card in the Alps a lot this seems the best place.

This year (2025) I wasn't sent my BMC membership card. It usually arrives in the Spring Summit magazine but that didn't arrive either. (I've checked and I'm still a paid up member).

I've heard rumours that we now have to log on somewhere and can see an electronic form of our card but nowhere on the main BMC web page does it even mention logging on.

Also heard that emails went out but I've searched my emails and cannot find anything from the BMC related to cards

Has anyone else experienced this?

Even if I can find an electronic card, how do we get reciprocal rights in remote huts where there is no signal, even if we want to lug a mobile phone up with us instead of a small piece of card?

, 

Have things moved on?  I don't recall BMC cards allowing reciprocal rights.  At one time you had to pay for a specific reciprocal rights card.

I don't think a BMC membership card entitles you a discount although it seems many hut wardens think it does.

I'm a member of the French Alpine Club which has also stopped issuing membership cards but there is a downloadable version which I have on my phone as an image (can't remember if its pdf or jpeg) - as long as I can open my phone I can show that to a hut warden. If I was going on a long trip & was worried about my phone running out of charge I'd just print the image & take that.

You can log in or register at https://mso.thebmc.co.uk. From there you can add your digital membership card to Google Wallet or the Apple equivalent. This will be stored on your phone and accessible even without a signal.

The digital card looks nothing like the classic membership card, but it does have a qr code which I guess people can somehow scan to verify it. Not sure how that works in a hut or refuge, but I suppose the main use case is claiming discounts in shops 

Personally I prefer a physical, paper card. But there was a recent thread on here where I got all grumpy about this "improvement" so I'm not going to go over it all again.

It was a CAF hut guardian, in the Ecrins in the 1990s, who explained to me at length (my French is poor), that for RR, only proof of UIAA recognised club membership was required… He couldn’t understand why the BMC were making separate RR cards and told me not to bother with one in the future… I confess I didn’t check this or even feed it back to the BMC at the time. Since then, I only ever travelled with my BMC card. However, another CAF hut guardian accepted my (Danish) DKK membership card (I lived there for a while) as RR, without me asking, and then gave me the same explanation… although that was 2017… I’ll be honest, I thought things had moved on from RR cards… I’ll check in with this post again as now I feel I may have made an historical error… or at least a ‘faux pax’… at least my french is improving… 

'pax'?

Your Latin, certainly! 

😂 false peace… American influence? … Faux pas… damn that predictive text… I welcome your correction! 
cheers, Jim

"You can log in or register at https://mso.thebmc.co.uk" 

That's a very helpful post for others to see as it explains where you can see you card (You can't download it but at least you can take a screen shot and print it.) Unfortunately there's no link to the mso site from the main BMC site

However, since my original post I have had some success in my research

On 7th March 25 the BMC sent out one of their usual 'interesting' emails, the first few pages of which were devoted to discussing budget matters and some new member of the board. If you persevered in reading then at the bottom was a small note saying that Summit would become digital soon and that so would the membership cards, but no further details.

Then on 29th May (two months after club's 2024 BMC membership cards ran out) came another email showing the link you gave to https://mso.thebmc.co.uk. However the actual url behind the visible link wasn't the same so my antivirus software assumed it was either spam or malicious and quarantined it. As far as I can tell there have been no further reminders or specific notices, either by email or on the web site.

As it happens I use the mso page to administer club membership for all the members of my club and logging on just now I was offered the chance to link my personal membership with my admin account for the club. Lo and behold my membership card appeared!

Regarding reciprocal rights, maybe I use the wrong words. For the last forty or so years I have always been given a big discount in CAF huts, (often in the Ecrin!) something like 50%, just by showing my BMC card. That's what I meant. Whether this is true RR  or something else I don't know. Using the mso site it recommends adding your card to Google Wallet but I'm not sure a QR code on my phone will work as well as a physical card in a hut. I'll print out a screen shot of the original looking card from my MSO profile page! Thanks to all who responded.

the vast majority of hut guardians aren't really bothered whether they give you a discount on the bed fee or not as the local section get this money not them.  The hut guardian gets the money from the food

Just a couple.of quick clarifications . When I wrote:

I meant the card that gets added to the phone wallet if you click the button to do that. The card on the webpage looks like a regular BMC membership card.

As others have said, you can't save the digital membership card because its not a discrete image, but you can snapshot it. And it is possible, at least on android, to add the snapshot image to Google Wallet so that its available if the phone is offline. In the wallet app tap "everything else"and then the round button with an icon of a landscape picture, then choose the shapshot picture. This creates a separate copy in the wallet.

In the email I had, it links to https://thebmc.us7.list-manage.com/track/click with some unuque tracking IDs appended. This is fairly common practice (unfortunately) and was probably automatically generated by the service they use for sending bulk emails. its likely to be so that they can quantify unique click-throughs, rather than an attempt to actually spy on us. 

Correct, BMC membership does not get you reciprocal rights (which is not to say hut guardians don’t think it does).

You don’t download it, you add it to the wallet on your phone.

Try contacting the BMC. I did so by email and after a slight delay have now been sent a conventional card just as in previous years. 

Sadly, no hardcopy 'Summit' though.

Hmm. They're not advertising that possibility!

There's now an article on the website including FAQs about the roll-out of the electronic membership card:

https://thebmc.co.uk/en/how-to-use-your-digital-bmc-membership-card

Hope that helps answer some of the queries (note the cards are being phased in over the next couple of months through to the end of July - timetable in the linked article).

Cheers, Dom 

That clears a few things up. Still not ideal if you're in a hut with no signal. I’ll probably just print a copy to be safe. Surprised the option to request a physical card isn’t more visible.

Thanks. Can you clarify whether or not getting a printed physical card is still an option (as implied above by Gerry.) And, if it isn't, can you comment on why the BMC website doesn't make it easily possible to download and print an image of the digital card?

Also, regarding this excerpt from the FAQs:

"The new BMC digital card tech means that only one logo can now be added to the card - the BMC logo."

That seems pretty poor. Where does the tech you're using come from? Who commissioned it?