orbitmc a great post and I agree with most of what you say. It is of course perfectly possible that BA never makes any profit flying LHR-MAN and that the purpose of the route is to feed connecting flights at LHR. I can well imagine that if you are GGL then you believe that you are very important to BA but of course at a marginal level you do not really matter one jot. What is more important is the "herd" behaviour it produces: the herd of GGLs feel valued and therefore all use BA in premium classes preferentially and frequently. The herd of GGLs are commercially important maybe, but the individual cattle: not at all.