corporate-wage-slave

It's not often cheaper than ET, but I can promise you that there will be people making bookings into ET in this scenario. Firstly the scrape OTA sites which may not pick up these nuances and only show the ET fares, and also those travelling on company travel policies which prohibit CE.

But there is a particular story to this example: you will note that this is a flight which is not far off, time wise. ET fares will rocket on the basis that anyone booking at this time really has to travel, therefore market forces shoves up that fare. Avios availability will probably be around despite the high fares. The CE fare here is a Saturday Night rule CE fare, which are among the lowest CE fares around, but they work of a different marketing process so if the allocation for this fare is still available, it may be open for purchase very close to departure. The intended purchasers are leisure travellers rather than business travellers. In other words ET and CE are working on two non aligned channels, serving different markets.

I'm not aware of any across-the-board stats on who pays what, I imagine that would be extremely market sensitive to BA so I doubt we will ever know the full underlying story. Anecdotes - unreliable as they are - will have to suffice. But on business routes the business class fares will be market led - so detached from ET fares but relative to LH/AF/KLM etc - whereas on leisure routes the structure is more about "if we can get £100 out of them, how can we get £150?" There again if you look at some of the Greek island fares from LHR (not LGW) the CE fares can be amazingly high. I remember seeing one such flight through the system, and very, very few people paid under £300 to be on that particular flight in ET, the last CE ticket being sold for £600 per leg. The flight went out full, no staff standbys, BA made an absolute mint on that service. I suspect they had takings of £50k and marginal+staff costs of under £10k, Nice work if you can get it.