Globaliser

The whinge was actually about building an IT process that would do it automatically. A manual system would probably be less costly.

But there would be two obvious problems that I can immediately think of.

One, which applies whether the system is human or by IT, is that some people change their minds between the original request and the end of the two-week period. They may have had to do some unexpected extra travel, or they may have decided that it's better for one reason or another not to extend the year and to have the TPs from the 9th to the 22nd of the month count in the new year after all. (See this thread for an example of someone whose timing means that there would be no point in trying to renew Silver in the current year: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...-question.html - but that's something they may realise only after the original request is made.) You don't have to read many threads on the two-week extension to see that people do change their minds. So if done automatically, there'd be requests to unwind the extension. For these cases, BA would have unnecessarily spent money on doing the extension at the two-week point and then unnnecessarily spent money on undoing the extension thereafter. Similarly, there will be some who will end up not doing any travel during the two-week extension, but BA would have unnecessarily spent money on proactively checking and calculating at the two-week point.

The second applies particularly to humans: Any human-run system is bound to go wrong. That would cause more work. Actually, come to think of it, given that much of BA's customer-facing IT is not very robust, this would probably apply to an IT system too.

Given that this is a favour being asked for outside the rules, it seems perfectly logical that BA should basically do what its oneworld partner does, ie action the renewal on request when the member has actually done the extra travel and still wants the extension.