Originally Posted by
Bear96
BA are not trying to turn customers away. Surely they know they will lose some, but no doubt they have run the numbers and feel confident that the smaller value customers they will lose will be replaced by "better" (in BA's eyes) ones. I do not pretend to have an educated opinion on whether they will end up being correct.
I am sure you're right about the latter - that BA think their new setup will be better for them. I mean, it would be madness if they did this thinking otherwise. What I am less convinced about is that this belief is based on strict rationality and careful number counting. I have seen too many really poor business decisions over the decades, by small and big businesses and anywhere in between, to have too much faith in how well thought out it all is.
On the first point - I am not entirely in agreement. The new structure is, in fact, telling a chunk of people that they're no longer going to be offered an incentive to keep giving BA their business. Some probably will continue to fly BA, of course, but the question we can't answer today is whether overall BA will be winning out of this. I struggle to see how they could, but then again I don't have all their facts and I don't run an airline. What I can be certain of is that the new structure has removed my incentives to give my business to BA.
Originally Posted by
Bear96
I don't know what kind of business you are in, but airlines are after higher yield ("better" customers) rather than more income overall. In some cases it may even be worth leaving some seats empty if the remaining ones are being filled by customers paying higher fares.
Perhaps, but I perceive it differently: to me, the loyalty programme was about filling up those empty seats, it does not exclude having higher paying customers or indeed trying to lure more of them on board. Using the LP incentives to fill up empty seats is a direct win to their bottom line after all.