Originally Posted by
HFHFFlyer
I’ve now spent three days having discussions with people as well as looking at this forum and social media. I would put the reactions into four categories of people:
Premium Leisure Travellers - “Oh well. Never mind. We just want to do as much travel as we can whilst we are still able. The Gold Card was nice but we will live without it.”
Budget Leisure Travellers - “BA are so expensive. What’s a Gold Card?”
Business Travellers - “What are tier points anyway and why are the lounges always full of people who seem to have nothing to do?”
AVGeeks, TP Runners, etc - “This is the end of the world as we know it. After all my year of loyalty, who do BA think they are? I will never step foot on a BA plane again. So what if I’m not a profitable customer, I WANT A GOLD CARD,”
I'm blue, I've always been blue, I probably always will be blue. But this year as a couple we've tipped £7000 into BA Holidays and for that we've got 150TPs each- and that's with the double TP offer. Under the new scheme we'd be 85%-ish of the way to bronze and one more city break would do it.
My view is that the ones complaining are the ones who have the time and dedication to do LHR-SOF-LHR-JFK-LAX instead of just flying LHR-LAX. Even though LHR-LAX direct was more expensive, it nets a fraction of the TPs you'd get from the convoluted routeing.
The old scheme rewarded sectors flown and cabin choice, it didn't reward spend. From the airline's perspective you can see why they've reached the conclusion they have.
And the feedback will have been carefully curated from the sorts of people (high spend, time-sensitive) who would agree. Anecdote isn't the same as data and all that, but I know one GfL, and he gets his status by flying to the Middle East once a month on flexible business (company paying, obviously) and has been doing it for 20 years. He's very much in favour of the change!