Originally Posted by
Moomba
The point I was trying to make whilst it is fine have a super elite status that gets some extra benefit, like more award availability etc., shouldn't BA do something about fixing some of the problems discussed in this thread?
Surely they would be better off not pissing people off in the first place rather than schmoozing their top 3000 customers when the inevitable happens?
Or does BA think it can survive just on the income of the top 3000 whilst the rest of us Gold bugger off elsewhere?
This is exactly the point I was trying to make several posts above. It is one thing to protect the revenue from the very top tier of customers, that is perfectly reasonable, but the flying habits of those customers will inevitably change over time. BA should really be correcting some of the many problems which will (IMHO) reduce the number of customers prepared to replace the current top 3000 as the original numbers decline.
Look after your top customers well by all means, but also ensure that the pool of potential top customers is not "drained" as a result of the utter frustration many people regularly experience when flying BA (not all of these things are entirely within BA's control but the response to external factors is within BA's control). The complete and utter lack of anything approaching a decent customer relations/service recovery tea, for all but Prems and GGL is a rather bad joke. We all know the kind of crap we see in letters/emails back from BAngalore and that is when they can be bothered to reply. If they cannot even grasp the basic issues involved in a complaint, how the hell can they accurately record these and take preventative action once the number of problems in a given operational area falls outside an acceptable range?
3000 people will not go very far towards filling each daily flight BA operate. Common sense dictates that normal Pareto optimisation principles will apply here (80% of revenue probably comes from 20% of PAX). BA's response has been to really look after the top 0.05% (my guesstimate) what about the other 19.95% of high revenue customers to say nothing of the remaining 80% who may go on to become high revenue customers.
Good luck to those on the GGL after all you have earned it. I am pretty sure I could not go through the pain of 3.5k TP's a year on BA Metal for at least 3 years. However decent Customer Service should not begin and end with this elite group.