Agreed with the previous, I was not going to complicate the issue too much at the start. Low season savings are marginal. High season savings are significant in some cases. The flexibility of non ex LON can be critical. However, if you are going to burn all your sectors outside Europe then this is not important.

The other thing is that not everyone lives in LON so a cheap regional low cost flight to greater Europe and then coming back into LON on BA can actually work out cheaper than some of the domestic costs in the UK for getting to LON in the first place.

(The other reason in more psychological, perhaps if they experience a bad first sector on a low cost, then they won't complain too much about 1W in Y!

Oh yes, NM the visit to BNE has been postponed so the beer is on hold for now. It will be before year end. I will probably wait until early November as I don't want to waste too many status points on this year but going for QF 2100 points after Nov 01.