Originally Posted by BadNewsFairy

Well it gives me no pleasure to say, and of course it wouldn’t be BA without being delayed twice… but I told you so. I’ll take KARFA ’s £5 in the form of a donation to a charity of his choice.

Some additional thoughts on the background and the key segment BA wants to ‘win’ from this.

• The timing of the announcement is mainly because some important people had it in their YE objectives to achieve in 2024 and the bonus is only likely to be decent this year for those who met their targets.
• Soft landings will disappear - this can’t be advertised because they were never official in the first place. A small number of people will be granted one quietly next year if they keep spending decently but don’t quite make a tier.
• Account managers will be given a stash of Silver cards to incentivise corporate travellers who are likely to defect. They’re more frightened of United than anyone else at the moment so if this is you, threaten to move your business to them…
• This has been on the cards since 2017, i.e. well before McKinsey began their takeover of the company, but yes they have helped with some of the more recent strategy behind it.
• Many at BA do think it’s a terrible idea but have been forced to do it anyway, even some of the team who are implementing it.

As an example of who BA wants to ‘win’ here, think of the following example… a senior exec in a multinational who flies regularly but not frequently, e.g. to a quarterly board meeting. They travel enough to get Silver but not Gold, so can’t use the F lounge. They have a second home in the Loire Valley so most leisure flights are on Ryanair, but their one annual longhaul holiday is on Virgin to Disneyland. Rightly or wrongly, several BA senior managers have had a bee in their bonnet over this for years… and have been known to rant about cheapskate TP runners (their words!) getting Gold but not someone they think ‘deserves’ it more. And with more leisure customers taking up space for longer in the lounges than business customers used to, they decided the balance had tipped too far in the wrong direction.

And the changes have a secondary benefit in being more attractive to higher-spending Americans, who are the prime target base at the moment.