I can confirm what brightstar100 has seen having worked in the Financial Industry for 25yrs. Snr Mgt (Global Heads) have flexibility on ticket prices, but 90% of staff travel has to follow the ‘lowest logical airfare’ rules of the company. While there are ways to ‘game the system’, normal LHR - JFK fares for my last company were in the region of £2,500 return for R class (the agreed price). If a last minute flight was required, then the price would be based on fare class availability but would require exception approval from Snr Mgt. I also know that 90% of the employees who booked these fares were not doing 8 round trips to NYC a year (2 visits a year were deemed enough). Flights to India and Asia (depending on the destination and competition on the route) can be higher, but again 1 or 2 flights a year to these places were done at most. The people spending £10K on LHR - JFK round trips are already noted by BA as higher spenders and generally have the status aligned to this, which puzzles me why BA have decided to alienate the people who go out of their way to select BA for loyalty reasons.

I still believe there will be a day of reckoning on this BAC change and we’ll see an amendment to the following thresholds by 2027:

GGL - 30K (renewal) / 50K Initial
Gold - 15K
Silver - 6K
Bronze - 3K

Pilot37