Ah yes, of course that explains it : how come nobody else thought of the dreaded Covid ……

It clearly requires zero effort for you to ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ to an airline on which you haven’t set foot for many years and hence are not remotely affected by any perceived service failures or communication issues.

There is nonetheless something quite irrational and blinkered about your urge to trot out ‘fly with another airline’ advice - not least to very frequent flyers such as OP orbitmic who a) have significant first-hand, regular, experience of actually using BA and b) may have very good personal and/or business cause to continue to do so. Spending money with a globally-recognised airline and having (totally reasonable) expectations of prompt access to adequate global customer support mechanisms when things go wrong should not be mutually exclusive activities.

Perhaps at some point you may wish to pause and give thought as to the level of often needless frustration that can be encountered by current-day frequent flyers. Until that happens, I find it near-impossible to attach any weight to the skewed perspective of someone who never actually uses BA, and therefore has no practical, real-world, need to engage with either their operational systems or their personnel ……. but is seemingly never short of a myriad of excuses intended as a defence for the airline’s cost-cutting measures. .