Gold77

Thanks that's what I thought. So the argument that achieving silver becomes more difficult is then irelevant. You could get silver for less than £3k spend incl taxes.

irishguy28

I thought the stopover could be for a much longer time?

And there would be no APD impact - If you were originating from within the UK, anyway. You would have still paid APD based on your final destination, so how long you may have stayed in London while travelling there from EDI/ABZ/BHD/GLA/MAN/wherever wouldn't matter....no?

LupineChemist

My corporate portal just gets us the cheapest fare bucket it can get a hold of. If you need a higher fare, you'd better be prepared to justify that cost.

I don't think this arrangement is all that uncommon.

LonghornSF

A 25-50% devaluation is HUGE. Saying that customers who don't like the change are "overreacting" is ridiculous.

Skipcool3

Agreed. Don't save airline miles, hotel points or similar long term.... They are (nearly) always devalued..

And I have added free stopovers a number of times, the period between flights has often been many months..

MickV

So what would you say to gold card holders that over the past couple of years have seen the benefit of silver reduced every more?

gold and up the changes are relatively little and it is nice to see a bigger difference between the levels. As others have pointed out the day was always coming.

Lioneye

I don't think it's a over reaction..................I'm considering escalating it to a hunger strike from Monday.

Gold77

Just fly domestic and you won't have to force yourself

RobDBA

It's corporate travel and I'm put in the cheapest fare possible. There isn't any way to request a particular fare bucket on the booking portal and I'm sure if I were to use the phone service (which is highly discouraged anyway as the booking fee is higher) I would have to justify a higher fare which I'm all but certain wouldn't be allowed.

Again don't get me wrong, I've had it good for years thanks to BMI and BA and I can't see how they made much margin from me at all, this is all understandable and good business - but don't expect me not to be upset.

Also - it may be only a few booking classes that have been devalued but what does that mean for the amount of seats available that still earn 100%? Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic but my assumption is that the vast majority of economy seats sold prior to 2 weeks before the flight (another corporate rule I have to follow) are in the lower booking classes. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll get more tier points than I thought, I've never had to take note of booking class before.

browserden

I called 2014 the year of the enhancement, but it looks like it's only just begun.

There's no way I'm going to reach silver anymore so I'll give in when I drop.

With Little Red disappearing (which I actually really liked, with T1/T2 being closer to Central London, low fares and plenty of free seats), East Coast Rewards devaluing (well getting replaced by Nectar which is totally useless) BA seemed to be the obvious route going forward. Now I'm not so sure. EDI-LON by train (or EDB-KGX in rail talk) and earn pitiful Nectar points, or by plane and not earn enough TP to reach status (I don't do 50 sectors on a usual year).

I think the train is preferable, status was the only thing that made flying fun. The train you just sit there and forget about it, I'm hoping the promises to improve the on-train wifi happen, but even if not I have 4G. Flying you have to mess with security, etc.

Ultimately all we can do is vote with our wallets and choose the least worst option.

The banner on the Save East Coast Rewards website seems to sum up what people are also feeling about BAEC:

FrancisA

I live in Brighton and can get to LGW in 30 mins and take a direct flight to NCE from there.

However, I also like Edinburgh and fancy a couple of weekends there. I book a reward to NCE leaving EDI April, stopover for three months, take the return LGW-NCE flights in the summer (as I would anyway), stopover again, then fly to EDI October. I bolt on a very cheap LGW-EDI return leaving in April and coming back in October. Two weekend returns for the price of one plus a flight to the south of France for the same price I'd normally pay.

That loophole.

Whilst I can sympathise with those in the regions who have lost this benefit, if the posts on here are any guide (big if I know) lots of people were doing this. Look at the main thread on the changes - someone even complains that BA are stopping them doing something similar to what I have described.

I am afraid it is sadly true that if you give something away, plenty of people will take one, even if they do not need or want it. Look at the discarded copies of Metro strewn over buses and trains or Waitrose's recent decision that you must make a purchase in its cafes to get a free coffee or tea.

As with Open Doors and free gold reward changes, when BA detect abuse (often helpfully bragged about on here) they put a stop to it, sometimes in a heavy-handed way.

Whilst preventing stopovers might have tackled the problem, I suspect BA didn't want the flack from those with a genuine need to break their journey complaining about overly restrictive ticket rules.

Anyway, I do sympathise with those who weren't gaming the system.

irishguy28

OK, but again, I don't see that this was a "loophole".

it doesn't really make any difference to BA whether you take all your flights in a short time frame, or spread them out over the year. A free domestic flight is still a free domestic flight, regardless of whether you use this straight away when connecting to/from an international flight, or whether you set it aside for a different trip.

They just don't want to give free domestic connections anymore.

Whether or not large number of people were building in stopovers in London does not make any real difference to BA. The cost to BA of the free domestic flight is [on average] the same, whether you use it on the same day as your international flight, or whether you use it 3 months later...

browserden

Of course it mattered! BA has to pay two lots of APD if you stop over in London. That meant a big loss on every Avios ticket, if you don't stop over then you're fine.

Also why is DUB-LHR-NYC cheaper than LHR-NYC? Because they have to price competitively to get people to go through Heathrow!

For £70 + double Avios for the pleasure of going through Heathrow, or even worse Gatwick, I might as well just look at the LCC options out of EDI.

Others doing that may realise that there's no real difference (when you don't have status) between BA and the cheaper DIRECT options. They now all have crap legroom, they all charge extra for luggage (HBO is not a discount, it's the base fare they use in advertising) the only difference is the LCCs charge for catering but that means you can have more than a shrink wrapped crisp if you desire.

T5 has no Priority Pass lounge so another drawback of BA if I drop from silver.

mjh0

Actually, on some *A carriers, their Silver is the equivalent of BA Bronze. No lounge access. Just some queue jumping privs and some bonus FFP currency.

In that sense, BA Silver is/was more like most other carriers' Gold (Lounge Access, bonus miles, extra queue jumping, etc., wistfully wishing I could include working priority baggage in this list), and BA Gold is like many other carriers Plat (or whatever they have above Gold).

Silvers, likely due to a) their flying patterns, b) class of service, and c) reduction in bonus miles do seem to be taking the bulk of the beating in this restructure.

It doesn't seem that long ago since anything below Y/B/H on short haul didn't earn any tier points whatsoever and a paltry sum of BA Miles - i.e. it could be much, much worse.

At least we've not hit that depth of nadir.

Mike

GUWonder

I used to be of that thought before I learned how to use miles/points to generate more miles/points.

Also, some changes that devalue the miles/points in part end up increasing the value of the miles/points for others -- I'm thinking about those US-based BA Visa and Amex MR credit card users whose BA points were made hugely valuable for short-haul and intra-America redemption purposes while gutting the value to be had for using them for long-haul BA flights in premium cabins.

The ultimate BAEC game players spared the worst of the changes this time tend to be us Yankees using credit card generated Avios for non-BA flights. Rather amusing that the 50k-100k credit card "sign-up bonus" customers less likely to fly BA metal are largely spared the worst of this hit.