First time in the F lounge for a few months and I hope the cost cutting is not because of the extra people using the lounge that used to be bmi gold. It was so easy to get gold on bmi that this must have caused the number of people eligible for the lounge to increase dramatically.

I'm one of those who benefitted from this status match and I certainly appreciated it at the time and this made me feel good about BA and so decided to stick with them rather than status match with A3 and go back to Star Alliance.

Now I'm not so sure whether it's worth bothering to retain gold once my status match is up. The catering is now no better than that in the club lounge that I remember from BA flights before I had status.

If the increased feeding costs due to the bmi refugees is the real reason for this then I think BA should have handled the transition as follows:

1. Allow diamond club gold members access to the F lounge for the first 3 months (so they could sample the benefits of gold)
2. Offer a fast track status challenge (like I believe AA do) for diamond club gold so that those who had shown a commitment to BA would have gold status.
3. Match all the other diamond club golds to BA silver which was the more appropriate tier as bmi didn't have any first class lounges. The status match should have been for a maximum of one year.

The catering is still better than bmi lounges, but bmi gold was easier to get, it doesn't seem worth the effort to try and maintain BA gold if you have to eat elsewhere first.