I go back to my comments when this happened, which is that BAEC was a great low cost way for the flying business to tie in the mass of individually low spending customers which aggregate to a huge amount of margin because of sheer weight of numbers.

In a way this is following 80/20, but with a subtle twist, you look after 80% of your repeat business using 20% of the effort because they reliably rebook to earn 40TPs here and there and tend to favour BA or OW. Then you use 80% of your schmooze capacity to bring in corporate accounts with high volume but which are more demanding.

As things are now, BA are having to do more marketing and sales and putting more effort into shoring the middle spend section up.

All of this would be irrelevant had the original IAG intent to vastly increase corporate income by providing customers motivated by status seeking to partner businesses (to whom Avios could be sold to be used as incentives) been realised, the notional £4B incremental revenue stream without significant capital needs and at 30% opbit. But that has failed: the partners have baulked, AMEX aren't showing a lot of enthusiasm (and hold vast amounts of Avios they bought to keep BA afloat during covid), there is Wineflyer, that theatre announcement, and I'm struggling to see much else. Now that may be better next year, but a lot of the mid range spenders have jumped ship, many have taken the changes personally and have lost trust, and we're not seeing any intensity of announcements. So the number of motivated earners is decreasing, they're being replaced by suits who frankly don't think much about earning Avios, and it all spirals a bit. IAG need a large critical mass of BAC members who look serious about spending money.

So getting into a year on, BA are putting elements of segment based earning in, and I suppose they're hoping they can thereby hook more of the mid spenders back in, but it's very late in the game. If they've lost patience with McK and the original BA flying business management are getting more of a say then all bets are off, really, but they can't just roll status over to give time to fix things because those who have committed 10s of K would get seriously annoyed. So all a bit of a mess really. I can't help being a little amused by the developments, and I think I have a decent record in forecasting how this would play out right from the alignment of TP years, but it's a real shame that good and decent people within the business got shafted by consultants.