100% this. The loss of a few hundred TP runners is a drop in the revenue ocean - the only surprise to me is that they didn�t make the change sooner tbh

Then we're back to "If these TP runners are pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things", then why the need to change anything?
There must be a greater overall cost to the airline beyond these forums as someone doing 2-3 runs to hit 1500TP, and not much else, isn't going to be a massive user of facilities.

Because the entire industry, and certainly the US Big 3, has moved or is trending to revenue spend based loyalty, and the sky didn't fall for their rewards programs. The value of a Rewards Program member has moved to total actual spend rather than no. of flights and distance. BA is just following the market and its leaders, whether we like it or not.

I changed from BAC to MH Enrich and I think I can hit OWS with approximately 3000 USD spend, which would be a lot less than what it would cost with the new BAC.

Huge difference is associated spend. There is a way to spend outside the program that allows you to rise up the tiers on the US 3. BA doesn't have that.

That's still just spend/revenue from the airline's point of view, which is the new mechanism to reward. Perhaps BA will add it, in time... but the US has a ton of personal credit card debt and incentives for airlines to move to that revenue stream.

Somewhat of a patronising comment on a simple statement of personal facts and preferences....I am very much in favour of each to their own

This is a really silly statement. What BA have done adversely affects the large segment of mid spenders with gold cards who previously obediently booked BA for work and took POUG offers to maintain status. Moreover it was done with contempt. BAEC was a very low cost way of binding these people in without effort.

The gamble on income via co branding has to pay off, and given the main engine is an estore that doesn�t track well and a credit card at loggerheads with the parent brand, I�m not at all sure it will.

Meanwhile they didn�t do the sums. You can�t. There is a spreadsheet somewhere with various frig factors adjusted so the business plan makes sense. If you could predict consumer behaviour accurately through spreadsheets we�d all be rich.

The TP runners are doing other things now. Most of the ones I know accelerated lifetime status or are getting status elsewhere or both. The impact is on the suits with their gold tagged bags.

If you think TP running fares is the only source of revenue that's going to be affected from BA's changes, I got a bridge to sell you.

The thing is it's not sums. You're modelling something with many unknowns, not least human behaviour. I've experienced many management decisions based on gut instinct, my feeling is..... methodologies.

Time will tell.

The way modelling for business plans works in practice is that its a form of chicken entrail examination. There is the idea in some forms of management that you can completely derisk any activity by "forecasting", and that "forecasting" is a precise art. It's particularly true in businesses that have left their explosive growth phase and entered an established format which is largely accountancy led. Explosively growing companies tend to be customer experience led.

In essence, you are asked to produce a model that supports a business plan that has largely been predetermined by the C-Suite. Unless there is something wildly wrong with the underlying plan - it happens quite frequently - and you're prepared to fight your corner, you just adjust assumptions until the required outcome is indicated. Then usually something will happen - late product introduction due to develpment delays is the classic - that provides covering fire if the outcomes don't happen. The bigger the suggested outcome the more pressure from the C-Suite to get it done, and I saw in my working career senior managers inching up amounts in various columns to get to a target without the first thought about the mechanism that makes the assumption true. Remember when everything was going to be subscription based services?

Sadly the easiest things to forecast are things which reduce the customer experience by nickel and diming costs. Brunchgate is a great example. So they tend to get waved through. The potentially paradigm shifting innovations are much more difficult to plausibly plan, so they tend to not get done except via disruptive start ups (difficult in aviation as Global are finding).

This is endemic to BA and IAG really. They're decently run businesses but they're very constrained by capacity. Hence the pressure to find something different, but rather than innovating they've adapted a cookie cut model provided by consultants who are also advising every other airline and every other airline is chasing the same money. So at some level it's very likely to fail to meet expectations, in which case it's quite dangerous to have knocked a hole in your previous business model. Maybe I'm too cautious. But we're already seeing late release of, for example, the Amex deal so someone somewhere is saying "we we needed credit card support, no wonder the model isn't working well". Or cover from Trump and antipathy towards US travel from Europe.

Incidentally what very successfully growing companies do - see Amazon - is to try things and reverse ferret when they don't work. IAG isn't like that. There's a technique I used a lot called Schrello screening which basically does a sanity check on an idea in an afternoon and you can move the same week.

So brilliantly put!

IAG have jumped on the financialisation of aviation bandwagon, turning tier points to another currency alongside Avios. I don't think the size of that market in the UK will ever be comparable to the US because UK regulations place a lower cap on how much card issuers make from transactions, so there's less money to play around with on 'perks'. BA did stumble on something hugely beneficial with BA Holidays. I had never really been attracted to bundling my plane ticket and hotel until the double tier points. But this only works if people actually feel that channelling holiday spend into BA would unlock attainable benefits, which is no longer the case.

You also make a really valid point on 'user centred' vs 'accountant-driven-number-fiddling', and I think this is a really big missed opportunity for BA. I believe there's real opportunity for innovation, but not in a 'Global' way.

If you took a user-centred approach, you'd realise that the underlying user need being delivered for the retail travel market is experiences. I recently took a BA Holiday to Mexico City for 5 days. A user-centred BA had every opportunity to turn this into an incredible experience with so many 'experiences' built in that would have been add-ons with high margins.

If you used me as an example, I live in Leeds. BA doesn't fly here, so I went to Manchester Airport. What if they picked me up at home with a tie-in with Veezu ride-hailing, dropped me off at Leeds Station on a first class ticket on LNER into KGX with transfer to Paddington and Heathrow Express?

What if they curated my visit to Mexico City with tours booked, cutting out Tripadvisor/Klook. We talk about AI. They can learn what I like. Heck they could even build up knoweledge of what me and my friends and family like and proactively recommend group holidays to us. All of this is only doable by a company that sees "Digital" as a core competency and it's business (rather than finance) and this is where IAG is going wrong. They should not be putting all their eggs in the financialisation of rewards business basket, and should innovate into a true International Experiences Group (IEG) company. But the fact that they're still outsourcing their supposed IT Transformation tells me that they've not woken up and smelt the coffee yet.

Sure BA used to have some options to book experiences. Not sure if they still do?

Was Addison Lee, in the M25 area, a separate car service?

Does BA have a big enough market for experiences via BAH or whatever?

I disagree that consumer or customer behaviour is difficult to understand, I'm very much in the Rory Sutherland school there. But it is difficult to build into a business plan.

For example Brunchgate: saved a third of catering costs on J long haul. Great looking spreadsheet. But what is the effect on customer experience? How do we quantify it? It's obviously a big negative because a keep part of the perceived customer experience VP of J is "the finest wines known to mankind and restaurant quality food". We frequent fliers know that's not true, but a plate looking a little fancy gets you some way towards the expectation. On the other hand, if it's just a light breakfast there is obviously a HUGE disconnect. And then you look at differential costs and realise how much those "fine" wines and "great" food are costing you compared with what you can get on the ground, and you have blown a huge and probably irreparable hole in the brand perception and perceived value prop. With premium travel you are ultimately selling swish via ego and once the perception the product is something special goes it's difficult to rebuild.

Similarly no-one really argues with spend based status, it's the way of the world really. But the way the BAEC changes was sneaked out before New Year with patronising platitudes and really dreadful comms - not to mention a feeling that customers were being fired if they didn't meet the BA profile - has really damaged brand perception in a huge and valuable segment. A good brand perception enables higher margins, so losing sentiment hits the bottom line. It's a numbers game at the end of the day, so you lose a % of brand perception and that scales directly onto the outcome.

This people stuff isn't rocket science, it's very simple psychology. But you get people so wound around their ideas that you can't get this through to them. It's much easier to point to a number in the forecast outcome than it is to make the arguments about behaviours stick.

I really miss a lot of this since retirement, not that having a good handle on it was enough to counteract the accountancy led part of the deal in many (most) situations, I don't miss the parts of the meetings where good ideas are rejected because someone in R&D refuses to look until the business impact has been fully quantified. But I did enjoy understanding systems and behaviours.

I think I've gone through the five stages of grief. I accept that BA are no longer as useful to me as they used to be. I accept that I can't change them, I can only change myself, etc etc. If they suffer for this, I don't care as I'm not a shareholder. But they may not suffer - and that's OK too. It's not a public service, it's a business.

I'm a shareholder of some competing airlines so I'm happy that they're doing well. My closest 3 airports are not served by BA, and as I've got older I've found Heathrow harder and therefore more expensive to get to.

All good things come to an end. I used to do courier flights (you'd see ads in newspapers) and they're no longer a thing in the UK. I used to "bid for travel" and stay in amazing hotels and get opaque flights for peanuts, but those sites don't offer the same kind of bargains any more. We were very early adopters of the internet and could use airline systems to find bargain flights. It's harder to find bargains now that we're not the only ones using the internet! I used to fly standby, turning up at airports to see what was available. That's not a thing in the UK now, as far as I know. I used to buy standby-only unlimited flight passes and explore tiny towns with tiny airports in other countries. They may still exist, but we can no longer fly as flexibly. There used to be fewer companies selling flights so I could spot bargain Concorde flights (for example) much more easily. Now there are so many blogs/podcasts etc talking about such things I'd be unlikely to be quick enough to bag a bargain. It's an internet jungle out there and I'm not the hunter I used to be.

I don't know what's next but I feel I've lived through good times and have travelled the world, in style, very cheaply (when not for business). Most of that happened because of the internet. But tech has got smarter and has allowed companies like BA to see that I'm not their ideal customer. I can at least look back at the good memories and the fun I had with tier point runs etc, and appreciate the golden age before companies could see that I was just a bargain hunter.

From now on, when I do fly BA I may find it harder to contact them as I drop down through the tiers. I may play around with status matches to see if that enhances my travel experience. I will experiment with other airlines. But that's OK. Times change. Maybe BA have made a mistake and maybe they'll backtrack a little, but they've already shown that I'm not an important part of their business model and that's OK. If/when I do have a lot of money to spend (I'm always mentally spending my lottery win) I won't feel any loyalty to them. I think it was a bit silly of me to feel that in the past. They're a business, not a friend.