Originally Posted by
brightstar100
Fully agree on this - travel is now scrutinised rigorously, even in highly profitable businesses with highly paid executives (high six figure, seven figure compensation levels). Plus, corporates are smarter than ever in their negotiation of route deals and rebates.
Yes, that and of course Zoom/Teams has put paid to a lot of the 'nice to do' trips. Other than the most essential travel, a lot of companies have heavily curtailed business travel compared to pre-Covid. Hence there seemed to be an understandable pivot by BA towards premium leisure as a target audience and seeming wanting to build or retain the client base through BAH promotions. The new Club seems to tear all that down as BA returns to focus on business travel....which arguably simply isn't there compared to even 10 years ago. And even if it was returning to the same numbers, I can tell you that a lot of people I know (corporate travellers) just don't rate BA in the same way that they used to. BA is no longer the default choice for many. As a few others have pointed out here, BA could easily get themselves tangled up in the belief that they have a good proposition (which they used to have, but don't have anymore) whereas their target audience have in many cases already left the programme and are spending elsewhere. From a personal perspective chopping a lot of the Gulf routes doesn't work for me at all but I'm more than happy with EK/EY/QR as alternatives. So it's a big gamble for BA from where I'm sitting as my spend with them would tend to be more leisure plus any TATL trips. By jacking up the Tier requirements without any pay-back I could be tempted to look elsewhere. So let's see what they do to ameliorate this over the next year or so.