Absolutely. For instance, many companies may have a Y policy under a certain length of travel, and indeed, many of us simply don't see the point of going for C on short/medium haul anyway. If I take my own case as an example, I would say that the vast majority of my long haul travel is luckily in J but the vast majority of my European travel is in Y.

On the broader issue of the potential ripple effects of the BAEC changes, I would be very surprised if AF or LH implemented any change before taking a careful look at the effect on BA. As NickB rightly says, it's largely a step in the dark for BA, and many of us wonder how big the risk is that it will backfire. It may of course succeed, in which case yes, I agree it is likely to give other ideas, but equally, it may result in some noticeable losses of frequent premium travellers and if so, I suspect AF and LH might find it a lot more useful to try and poach refugees from BAEC to strengthen their own captive audience.

I would also have to say that I am always a bit suspicious of the "US airlines have shown the way" kind of argument. The US and European airlines compete in very different environments. Firstly, domestic (and to an extent regional) travel accounts for the immense majority of air travel for US airlines. It doesn't mean that TATL or TPAC or South America is completely irrelevant of course, but clearly, domestic is their primary network. This is very different for European airlines. Secondly, the US airlines market itself is also essentially national, meaning that they can work fairly well with US credit cards, companies, etc to build holistic programmes. In Europe, no airline, not even BA or AF rely as much on a domestic audience, and of course, AFKL and the LHG are themselves multinational at heart. So to find models that can work for your entire key market (which may well include anything from Italy to Scandinavia) is a lot harder. Tthirdly, as noted before, banking and credit card laws are very different and make the credit card market a lot more lucrative in the US than in the EU. Heck, the whole point why in we are having stringent regulations on credit cards in the EU (and in the UK) is precisely to prevent that market from being so lucrative. It's a bit like the health system, entirely different across both sides of the pond and as far as I can tell, no appetite to make the EU model closer to the US one from either politicians or citizens, on either credit cards or health. So the migration of US FFPs from "frequent flyer" to "frequent buyer" is not working as squarely in Europe.

All that to say, I have no doubt that AFKL and LHG will carefully monitor what happens to BA in coming weeks and months, but I'd be surprised if people in any major European airline (BA itself included!) were willing to bet that this will be a resounding success at this stage. In fact, part of the discussion on the BA forum is that BA leadership itself is probably not happy at all about the proposed changes seen as coming more from IAG (the holding group) than the airline.