Considering that other major airlines are flying widebodies to TLV the move seems suicidal for BA. After a few "tries" very few will keep on flying 5 hours on a 321 when there are far better alternatives available. ELAL are filling 4 flights most days to London, 2 widebodies with excellent flat beds in business, and a good PE cabin, and 2-3 738s (which have a far better business class than BA's SH fleet). Even for connecting traffic, who is going to fly to the USA via London, when LX and AF offer proper business class for what is almost half the journey? What, fly 5 hours on a 321 just to spend the next 6 in F? Makes no sense at all. And the reduction of TPs from next April will kill off the monthly flyers, and I really don't see the 90 odd weekly flyers coming back to that sort of aircraft. TLV is NOT CAI! The demographics are very very different. There are very large numbers of people living with their families in Israel but who still work in Europe or even the USA (a neighbour of ours used to fly almost every week from TLV-JFK) and who travel extremely frequently. Flying once a month on the reduced TPs will just about scrape Gold renewal, putting a very large number of long term GGLs (many with over 70,000 accumulated TPs) out of reach for keeping their status. They will not be returning to BA. The competition on the route is far too strong for that. In the meantime, ELAL are sweeping the floor with full business class cabins (and rumoured to have ordered an additional 789 because of BA basically abandoning the route). I honestly feel that they have based this move on a very superficial reafding of the situation (tourists being put off flying by talk of war). If they were worried by that, I would have thought it would have been wiser for them to have waited longer and not returned to TLV now, rather than getting a bad name which will take a long time to fix.