wantmymoneyback

Trying to work out my worth to BA.

I usually fly 3 times a year with BA usually 2 x short hall economy to Palma, and 1 longhaul premium or business to USA.

I spend between £100k and £200k on 2 x BA premium Amex and between £200k and £500k on HSBC Premier MasterCard.

I presume BA sell the Avios to the CC companies so my spend is definitely contributing to BA profits in a round about way.

Any thoughts?

rossmacd

With that little amount of flying, absolutely not.

You are only important if you control corporate spends in the ten, even hundreds, of millions.

aidy

Nope... as the Amex is a shared between BA and Amex it won't be much

and in regards to be itself.. they only care about large corporate contracts... everyone else is just maximising profits

agehall

If you have to ask, the answer is probably "no".

Hint: If you are valuable, you probably have a black card in your wallet that BA has given to you.

MPH1980

Avios is no longer sold by BA to anyone. It's sold by AVG which is part of IAG.

so BA make no money from that credit card spend until you spend the Avios.

cbyrne92

With £11.5 billion in revenue for 2015 I think it is fair to say that 95% of people on this forum do not particularly matter to BA.

As mentioned above, unless you control large corporate spend or are GGL repeatedly / GGfL then we are merely fractions of percentages even with multiple premium LH trips each year.

Flounge

Absolutely not. Unless you accrue at least 8000-10 000 TP's on a regular basis. Being a CEO or CFO of a large company helps too.

Cymro

Again, absolutely not (and they'd barely acknowledge you if that was your monthly flying, rather than annual). The credit card spend may be of interest to avios, but BA won't know about it.

Not meaning to be dismissive, but that reflects both the size of the organisation and indicative of the way that it deals with its corporate customers.

I assume that you don't have any other flying that you could divert to BA, or control any travel spend for your business. If so, that might pique a little interest (but again, only a little).

henkybaby

With that kind of spend on your AMEX it may be worth considering using them as your TA instead of booking with BA direct. I have found them to be extremely helpful with travel problems, especially when flights were booked via them.

BlackBerryAddict

To be fair to the OP he didn't suggest he was important to BA, just curious what his worth was.
BA carries around 45 million passengers a year. Your three trips makes you six "passengers" - so you are about a 6/45 millionth worth to BA.
BA operating profit (in 2015) was USD1.9 billion - so you accounted for around USD250 of that. Not a lot really.

wantmymoneyback

You can add in my wife and 2 kids to the flights- but i get your point.

We do fly on other airlines, however no interest in just flying BA for the tier points as i do not value lounge access and when/ if I want it then I pay.

Many thanks.

HIDDY

Every customer is 'valuable' just some more than others.

Although I don't fly BA as often as I did I have been a returning customer for over 50 years. I like to think I'm more valuable than some Johnny -come-lately who comes on here throwing his weight about just because he's got a Gold card earned by flying other airlines.

flygod

Rather than the $250 value by Blackberry Addict - ie a share of the overall profit - your marginal profit, and therefore your worth, could be the entire cost of your ticket minus airport and government fees. (I am ignoring the fuel costs for carrying 100/150kgs of pax and luggage)

I am also assuming your flights are not full or oversold (and BA had one in five of its seats fly empty last year)

That's why small changes in passenger numbers can lead to massive changes in profits/losses.

One could even argue that the large-spending corporate customers bring in no profits at all: their role is simple to pay all the costs, meaning that the other passengers provide the profits!

T8191

BA still refer to me as a 'valued customer', which always makes me giggle considering how little we now use BA

Still, last year we kindly donated £10k in fares, taxes and fees to the Joint Venture with AA. Not a bad return for 63k miles flown in J/F

corporate-wage-slave

I'm well over that bracket, and I can assure you that BA will scarcely notice if I never fly with them again, and quite right too. I imagine if Formula One, a FTSE 100 (or even 10) company or the NHS decided not to fund BA travel then there may be moderate ructions, but that's about it.

However that is indeed the wrong way to look at it. BA does collectively need repeat bookings from regular customers, and is keenly aware of this. I am pretty certain that senior BA management regard BAEC as the jewel in the company crown. It will even encourage individual Gold cardmembers to fly a bit more often in order to retain their cards, if they look like running short on the requalification criteria. It just isn't dependent on any one particular customer, which is probably a good thing.