BAEC is very status-rich.
BA Flyertalk is very status-rich

Essentially anyone from BA who's monitoring this discussion is getting free Voice of Customer feedback. They'd be mad not to take advantage of that, particularly on a change with this large a negative impact on a core swathe of their customer base.

If we really believe this is Avios-neutral for BA, and that's not a line I find credible, then they should be very concerned about the volume of customers who might either walk or at least redirect some of their spend elsewhere. It's perfectly true BA won't care about us at an individual level. Collectively that's a very different proposition, and there will be a lot of people who'll no long see value in Gold. That's 80,000 customers potentially, and even if they're travelling on lower fares every one of them is paying out many thousands to requalify each year.

You're looking, specutively, at around £110m revenue drop if half those members decide it's only worth maintaining Silver. Because much of BA's cost base will be fixed and difficult to shift downwards quickly, a good percentage of this directly hits P&L. In 2022, BA made profits of £322m. If I were running the company, I'd be concerned about the impact and very interested in the feedback.