orbitmic

On one level, of course, any additional perk you give to anyone will always make them marginally more likely to fly an airline. However, that is not the sort of incentive we are talking about here (in fact, the sort of incentive you mention - make someone choose BA over easy jet etc is the most crucial of all for airlines but that is the reason why they have an FFP in the first place not a lifetime status).

I may be wrong of course, but my sense is that occasional flyers are not at all infrequent flyers, and not even upselling is (again, all that you achieve to incentivise through regular FFP and annual status). My understanding is that the catchment goal here is to have someone who consistently flies 100, 200, or 300 flights a year and would normally organise them by convenience to put 150 of them to BA instead of 100, or to resist the appeal to switch loyalty to AF after 10 years because BA is annoying them on a trip and AF has improved their product and they feel like taking a taste of the other side, etc. In short, lifetime status is really niche.

The reason for it is simple too: the idea is that you will continue paying for status benefits for the person well after they have stopped qualifying for them. This is an expensive, long lasting and not time limited/conditional spend for the airline. They really need to get a lot of advance benefit to make this worth it for them. Indeed, while the £52,000 estimate above may be a genuine "TP run record" possibility, I suspect that the bunch of GFL membership is achieved through cumulated payments of at least 10 times more than that.

Swissroll

To add to those who recollect a lifetime silver for 10 years of gold, if I recall correctly there was also a lifetime silver given to favoured long standing passengers (I think it was called Silver Rose?) who had retired. Also withdrawn. Thats why I have a slightly cynical view that lifetime gold means it will be around for the lifetime of the BA board that introduced it and not the PAX

Akoz

I completely agree, but I don't see why the same can't be said for some doing 150 short haul economy flight or 30 short haul business flights. A low threshold could convince them they have something to aim for and put 100 flight into ET or 20 into CE. On short haul people seem to be willing to put up with a poor service and are more price sensitive, and I would have thought that SFL would make the price part less significant. And so stopping people switching to U2, or KLM or AF.

Furthermore what would the real cost to the airline be? Club check-in - already manned. Fast-track - Not massive, Seat Selection - No real cost (and would cover the way u2 allow you to choice seats at T-30 days), Lounge access - small amount of drink and food. This against the income (Just scraping gold would take about 24 years to make GFL) 20 CE flight @ £120 (a conservative starting price, many CE prices are much much higher) per flight over the same 24 years would have brought in over £57,000 and more if doing it the really hard way in ET.

alex67500

I'm not sure I get this. 20 CE flights only makes 800TPs (unless they're all to HEL) you'd need 44 years to get to GfL.

Akoz

I was not talking about gaining GFL.
I was simple comparing the spend of someone doing long term silver and getting no Lifetime award to the quoted £54,000 to achieve GFL and using this together with the pull that an achievable lower threshold to a Lifetime silver level could achieve to justify why SFL could work.

onobond

My 2p that the poster actually meant 20 return flights.

As a side note: Planning for 44 years of travel to achieve a lifetime benefit, could of course be jeopardized by EOL occurring to either traveller, Gfl programme or even to BA

Jase76

Even though I've lived in the UK for 8 years, I stuck with QF to get LTG (BA equivalent is Silver). That now achieved, I am moving to BA but no great aspirations for LTG with BA. The difference between Bronze and Silver is a lot larger than the difference between Silver and Gold.

rruaco

I didn't really start flying with BA until my mid-30s. That means that LTG is out of reach, but they could easily capture some extra spend from me my employer over the next 10 years with a "more achievable" LTS tier - I do plenty of travel on other airlines after I'm sure I'll get to the Silver/Gold (depending) threshold each year.

alexwuk

These figures of "£50-60k for GfL" are highly misleading as they are just extrapolating the lowest cost Tier Points theoretically achievable x 35,000. Even with good corporate travel rates on point-to-point routes, most high TP Golds/GGLs are probably paying £5-20 per Tier Point on average, giving a more realistic range of £175,000 to £700,000 in total spend to get GfL.

littlefish

This is close to a point I was going to make. From BAEC's perspective they would need some sort of market or grouping that would find SfL (say at 25k TPs) a sufficient incentive to pull flights across to BA/OW. Yet, at the same time, not dilute away with those then abandoning GfL.
I can see SfL attracting (incentivising) those who do not believe 35k for GfL is in range, those like Jase76 who don't use BAEC at all until a competing FFP goal is met, or even those who'd otherwise bimble along to 20k without incentive to go with BA 25% more to get 25k.
I can see SfL having a high conversion rate to GfL. The killer question is the extent the SfL's do that in higher cabins versus on the lowest yield fare-types or further back in the plane than their norm.
The start-up cost and commitment, for such as SfL, must be high for BAEC and the business case pretty marginal. I wonder if its something in their back pocket to 'play' in a downturn to prevent (de-risk) haemorrhaging to competitiors?

T8191

looking at the Domestic accounts (2015-18), it seems we spent something over £10k on average for Gold renewal ... but that includes a large slab of forward spend for 2019.

If the £54k for GfL is to be believed, I'm clearly doing something wrong!

Akoz

I fully agree. I was only applying the same theory in SH travel. In reality in ET and CE the cost of TP would be in a similar region, possibly even more in the case of short notice travel. The main point I was making is that GFL is really focused on long haul travel. A lower threshold for a mythical SFL would be more achievable to people travelling predominantly SH, and could help to mitigate migration to other carriers based on price, while also increase the chance of upselling.

Akoz

I would have thought the start up cost would be negligible. While the on going commitment cost would be basically the price they pay for fast track and lounge access as other benefits are basically of no cost. Which would be mitigated by the customer still choosing to fly BA instead of someone else and in some cases paid for anyway if the customer continued to be in a premium cabin.

orbitmic

That is not that simple to be honest. Obviously, more people eligible to club check in the more the cost of manning it, especially at a time when airlines are moving to automation, so there is distinctly a marginal cost. Fast track, it is a fixed cost for each passenger (guests included) in each airport it is offered. Lounge access - same here, it is a fixed cost for every eligible passenger and guest each time it is used. Extra piece of baggage - that's shockingly a two figure cost on a one way connecting trip. As for seat selection, it actually also is a cost in the sense that the people who have it for free do not buy it, and whilst many people expect families to be the primary target, my understanding is that passengers in their senior years are actually the biggest market for paid seating for most airlines.

I think that your "not much of a cost"/"not massive" argument is very much the way we perceive it as customers, but that is not actually the way airlines see it, because it's worth remembering that the airline industry works on tiny margins compared to some other sectors. In many cases, the profit you make from a passenger will be measures in single unit pounds, and it is not unusual for it to even be a matter of pennies especially in Y because the pressure on fare levels on many routes is very high.

To cut a long story short, the benefits we get are often enough to transform any one of us status holder from a "benefit" to a "loss" on a given individual trips, so our loyalty only makes sense to airlines as the "big picture" where they feel that we more than compensate by adding a lot more trips where we'll pay through the nose and thinking of all the benefits that we do not use because we'd get them anyway, especially when travelling 1) alone and 2) for business, which is exactly what many people are less likely to be by the time they enjoy their for life status by a time they do not qualify annually any more. And obviously, that is benefits that are not bound in times or limited to certain conditions, etc. It is, in principle at least (and in the way the airlines cost it) forever.

So as you point out, the question of the "for life" status is indeed to be judged against the "big picture" income that it represents, but not the "total income" that you mention here, only the "extra income" that you would not be getting from the passenger without the for life status perk. If a passenger is, as you say, going to spend £57k (let's call it £60k) by the time they reach your hypothetical SfL, we thus have questions to answer to know about that marginal income:
1) how much of this was spent on BA? Of course, in your post, you claim your intention to catch short haul BA flyers, but very obviously, you reward the people who spend 80% of their money on AA, QR, or QF and merely take 4 segments a year on BA. So let's imagine that half of the total spend is on BA and that is probably above average - we are now down to £30k
2) how much of that money would they not have spent without getting SfL? That is, how much of that custom would you not have got the sum of all other existing status perks (lounge access, better treatment during IRROPS, chance of upgrade/low likelihood of downgrade, extra luggage, nicer seat selection, fast track, etc) nor because of people wanted to renew their status annually. There is no way this even account for 5% of that total spend so by now, we are down to, (in my view very optimistically) an average of £1,500
3) what are you losing in terms of enabling people who could have been tempted to keep fighting to go for GfL stopping, instead, at SfL considering that having reached SfL, they can now relax.

And that's basically it - we might be on a typical total additional income over a lifetime that may be somewhere between £1000 and 1500 at best (again, that is an average, some people will spend a lot more extra but many will spend nothing at all more, just reach SfL through their natural flying patterns), a total additional lifetime profit pre-additional costs which will be a small fraction of that, and a double digit extra net expenditure every time the person flies with no time limit. An airline might look into it and decide whether to gamble on it or not, but it is by no means a no brainer.

T8191

As one of the older contributors here, I can certainly relate to that. Although I don’t actually have to pay (for now) there is no doubt that ‘older bones’ place a premium on personal comfort and convenience ... and are thus willing to pay for it.