Originally Posted by
Raffles
A key driver is whether people who have requalified for 25/26 but have zero chance of requlifying for 26/27 continue flying BA in 25/26 (because they get their status benefits) or if they defect now to try to build status elsewhere.
Since, for short haul at least, the obvious defections are to easyJet (no loyalty scheme) then I reckon BA will keep getting the business for 12 months and the drop off won't show YET.
BA Holidays will be the first sign of trouble I think. No point booking there (unless price etc works) for beyond 1st April. That's IAG Loyalty's problem though, not BAs, except to the extent BAH is buying up seats from BA.
I agree with some of this. We've both qualified (Silver) until April 2026 and with an existing booking (pre Dec 30th) for June we'll requalify until April 2027. So for the moment we'll carry on booking with BA/OneWorld.
However we've just booked a BAH trip for later on in the year, simply because it was the cheapest way of doing it. And I think for leisure travellers it's going to be the best way to obtain status. Though for us, having looked at our spend, we wouldn't qualify.
Consequently in order to obtain status post April 2027, we'll either have to 'game' the system (TP runs via Finnair or similar, once every two years) or not bother and just buy premium seats on whichever airline is cheapest/best for the journey for LongHaul and go for the cheapest/most convenient SH journey. We have access to Hotlines which makes SH on BA quite competitive, which means we'd probably stay with them. It depends how much SH we plan to do as to whether it's worth going for the status. It doesn't really offer us many benefits for Long Haul.