but then again, the vast majority of people on high fare buckets are there through corp bookings which means 1) that the fare paid will likely be significantly lower than that paid by many passengers booked in lower buckets, 2) they are by far most likely to BOB as they can charge it on expense, 3) they are likely to be least service elastic as they will likely have been booked for nonstop and schedule.

In other words, whether 'deserving' or not (which I don't really agree they are in terms of the age old short term vs long term income), my sense is that comped goodies to highest fare pax is likely a counter productive expense in that it won't generate extra revenue.

whether comped goodies to high status will translate into income (by encouraging status pax to fly BA rather than, say u2 or af or lH) is of course open to debate, but by and large, I'd see the chance that it is as much higher than the fare basis.

I also think that whether status was earned by mostly flying BA or not is a bit of a red herring imho. For one thing, outside of ft, I suspect the vast majority of pax get frequent flyer cards with the airline they fly most so Baec will likely be predominant BA flyers. Even more importantly, however, freebies make no sense as a 'reward', they only make sense at inducing behavioural change. In that sense, the ow status is a good proxy that you have a customer likely to consider you (fare paid is not) so targeting them would just be an attempt to transform that potential into actual ticket purchases. Again might be successful or not (some airlines certainly seem to think it likely is) but either way how people got status is not really relevant in terms of the result you are trying to achieve as an airline.