Originally Posted by
jplondon
Your perspective, I just see that my previous membership year ending April I quite easily made the TP for GGL and that this year, ironically, post COVID, it will be harder for me. Reason being that I have to travel at exact days and times to exact locations, and cannot fly whenever BA decides to fly somewhere or is willing to offer me a ticket. Hence since April about a third of my flights have been SH with non OW, and I don’t see this improve. Try booking some flights to basic European destinations end august or early September and the schedule is awful, So yes it seems for people with flexibility when to travel all is possible but for business travellers (that pay better money) it is less so, I am almost beyond now, whether they do something or not, but it sounds they may end up with higher tier member that will spend less than others.
I think it is an over-generalization that business travelers pay the freight and the leisure travelers will now be getting something for nothing.
I'm a leisure traveler and I pay full freight for almost all of my tickets (99% of the time in the front of the airplane). I don't end up using Avios for flights very often because it is hard to get the flights and cabins I want with award space, plus if I don't pay for enough of my flights I wont have enough TPs to retain status. I doubt that I am alone, and I also think that leisure travelers are going to make up a much larger part of the high dollar/GBP paying passengers going forward, because the curtailment of business travel is likely to be a permanent situation. This is not because of the continuing spread and mutation of Covid, rather it is a result of the last 2 years, when companies were forced to realize that jetting a bunch of employees around the world continuously could be replaced by much less frequent travel supplemented with internet/Zoom/etc. meetings and other substitutes.