Originally Posted by
TraumaDoc
This is it. As an NCL based leisure traveller who hovered around the Bronze/Silver borderline, I never meant much to BA individually, but there are tens of thousands of us, and collectively we far outweigh the number of big spending GGLs etc. As a group we would have contributed a significant amount of profit through millions of small decisions each year to choose BA over, say, an LCC. That incentive has now been decimated.
Pretty much the same for me. I was silver going into 2020 without requalifying in my 2019/2020 year. I had flights booked in the month after the year ended (when the status was still active) that would have directly taken me back to silver (positioning flights on BA via Heathrow + long haul QR). Then the plague happened and I did not go - but got everything refunded without any issue. The BAEC decision to freeze the status had the cutoff after my collection year ended, so I dropped to bronze. So even before the BAEC->BAC change, I thought twice about flying with BA to maybe collect status.
I haven't been flying as much as before 2020, but they lost out on:
- A business class trip to the Maldives (primary reasons were that I would have needed to add a night at Heathrow on the return and my first choices for the resort weren't available on BAH; Went with EK and upgraded to First on 3 of 4 legs)
- A trip to Norway (to be honest, I had done that only because the quick HAM-BGO route on WF existed, so it isn't technically a loss for BA)
- A business class trip to Vancouver (around my dates about the same price as KLM(out)/AF(in) but a ~7am departure from HAM? Not going to do that for a westward flight. LH would have been a little cheaper via FRA - with 2-2-2 seating, no thanks - or more expensive via MUC)
- In January a trip to Switzerland (cost would have been comparable to LX, flight time longer, which would made my onward journey annoyingly late)
No plan to collect status on any airline now but I'll take the miles, the EK and AF miles went into gadgets from their shops, the KLM miles went into the WiFi prebooking for the AF flight, which did not work on board and was refunded as cash.