bisonrav

No problem with this. Companies are also free to pay the poor old employee for weekend travel, give time in lieu for recovering from jetlag, and overtime for evenings away when you're on duty (most nights of a trip in my experience).

The thing is they don't.

On Business is an absolute PITA if you're trying to maintain status using some degree of business travel, not least because there's often no control over when a redemption is used. It works out usually as a 1 or 1.25% reduction on spend I think. Asking an employee for an overnight Saturday stay often saves 20-30% if not more. Sarcastic comments apart, there has to be a bit of quid pro quo in the relationship between an employee and employer on travel, and this ultimately benefits everyone. If there's goodwill, everyone works together to minimise travel costs. If I think I'm being peed on from a great height I'll get a lot more militant in terms of the travel dates I accept not including weekends or late evening travel.

I'd be interested to know the actual fiscal benefit of the scheme in terms of overall average discount to a company in comparison to travellers maintaining silver status or above. Without status, I'd be expensing maybe £20-30 per airport on average for food and drink, so £40-60 for a simple return trip, which is quite a large percentage of the fare (just paid £850 or so for a WT+ trip to PVG, so it's about 8%) even without considering non-status colleagues being guested. So to be perfectly honest, and within reason, companies who have standardised on BA On Business should be trying to manage their frequent flier employees' status position and ensuring where appropriate that status is maintained.