Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
[The benefit that got removed was the ability to make the change before the date of travel, which then got mightily abused by one group of passengers]
(emphasis mine) Quite frankly, that BA people would even make such an utterly absurd claim when they tried to explain the policy change says a lot about the current trend of chronic dishonesty we are getting from BA which so many of us find incredibly infuriating:
When plus tickets were introduced, they were changeable subject to difference in fare. How can this be 'abused', mightily or otherwise? What does it even mean conceptually??
Let's think about it for a minute. BA finding that not enough people were buying up from HBO to luggage inclusive decided to make luggage inclusive more attractive. They explicitly introduced two changes: 1) same day change without any additional fee to the last seat, 2) no more change fee on the tickets so that outside of same day changes, you can make changes for difference in fare as is already the case with so many other semi-flexible fares. There was no loophole in the system. There was no way you could use the ticket change opportunity to do anything else than what it said on the tin.
So what exactly could be abused in BA's eyes? That people changed tickets that were changeable? Doh. Is the expectation that we are abusing our lounge access when we go to the lounge when eligible? That we are abusing refundable tickets when we ask to refund a ticket that could be? Or that we abuse POUG when we use BA's own offer to pay less for a premium class seat than we would have if we had bought it full price?
There was no abuse. It does not even mean anything outside of a context of airline's paranoid bad faith. BA are just using derogatory words to describe people using (not abusing) what the tickets afforded because they realised that this undoubtedly made fewer people buy fully flex tickets and that they considered that probably, they did not need to keep the 0 change fee to make people buy up. The rest is just their own version of post-truth and a misleading narrative to blame their cost cutting on passengers yet again, as they hid behind customer feedback for BoB, the bistro menu dismantlement, and pretty much any negative enhancement that they have engaged in. It is dishonest and quite frankly pathetic of them and I, for one, am not willing to let them get away with it without pointing out to the absurdity of their claims when it is, as is the case here, so transparently obvious.
On a separate note, I can confirm the Op's experience that the free same day change often fails both online and on the phone with requests to pay a change fee that is not due. And yes, I'm sure it is not a problem of time or anything, I am talking about changes initiated well after midnight at departure point which is BA's official policy. The strange part (to me) is that it never seemed to happen in the previous iteration of plus fares so I suspect that it has something to do with the confusion between same day vs advance changes.