Originally Posted by
lobstahpotts
You miss one important consideration with your first option. Based on the mileage figures you're throwing out there for BA Business, you're looking at almost 4.5k Tier Points on those flights alone. Depending on how much flexibility you have for your other travel, you could easily get up to 5k Tier Points and get Gold Guest List and the Concorde Room Card. After one year you only need 3k TPs to maintain GGL. For layovers in London that frequent, having reliable Concorde Room access will be really nice. And that much flying on BA means having the added prestige of GGL certainly won't hurt.
It would also be easy to make up those Tier Points by booking some domestic F travel in the US--there are some incredibly cheap options on which you can earn TPs quickly, both transcon and East Coast shorthaul.
One thing you don't mention is your lifetime tier points with BA. Depending on how many you have, it may be in your interest to push towards lifetime Gold status at 35k.
Reaching for 5k TPs and related perks could be very good option for many people (especially London-based) but not so much for me, I guess. I try to keep my flight times as short as reasonably possible: this is in fact the main reason I have chosen BA as the preferred airline on my main business route. Considering WAW-ATL I have about 1hr of lounge time each way so the visits are frequent indeed but rather too short to be a decisive factor. Other than my new biz-route I make LHR layover 2-3 times per year so this is hardly something to be concerned about.
Right now I have barely 1800 lifetime TPs so going for 35k is rather not an option - I would have to drastically change my travel patterns in order to make it work and this would too much of a hassle. Possibly I will think about if I ever move from PL to UK, as many of my fellow citizens ;-)