One point I have not seen raised in all the debate about the new structure is how effective may be it at attracting high spenders from other programmes. I would guess a lot of people (mainly business travellers with some degree of control over their choice of airline) who could not get e.g. Virgin, Lufthansa or Air France status (or BA under the old system) on a sector-based model are able to get BA status on a spend-based model, and so shift their travel to BA. I believe this is the behaviour the new system wants to incentivise. But on a BA forum those voices are inevitably not present. It doesn’t take many of those to compensate for all the TP runners and cheap Qatar business class flights people who are dropping out.