Stays in ultra luxury hotels. You can get just one week-long trip to New York, staying at the Warldof Astoria to net 123,000 tier points.

Maybe the numbers stay the same, but is the revenue for BA higher or even the same as before BAC?
Someone brought as example that two colleagues will became GGL without spending more, and he will lose status while not spending with BA as in the past.

What if most of the new GGLs, or even Golds, are reaching that level without changing the spending amount allocated to BA?

My hubby and I will both drop to silver for the first time in about 11 years .
Where we still fly BA short haul we are no longer opting to pay the extra to sit in CE.
We have actually booked some flights on EasyJet ( Gulp) for the first time.
Using KLM and AF much more as PE for Life.
The above means we are flying from Birmingham and Bristol more as these are much closer than Heathrow.
LH in C going for a much wider variety of carriers .
No BA LH booked other than with avios.

A tiny hit to BA financially but pennies add up I guess.

The shift in composition of the tiers isn't all that important, it's what the tiers can be induced to spend beyond flying. If people are becoming gold or GGL on the basis of existing flying patterns, the motivation to try to maximise nTP and Avios earning comes at the point where those patterns change and they drop status that they'd come to appreciate. You have to pull them into the spending ecosystem for the overarching strategy to work. If you read the AA forum about the CK customers who'd lost their invitations, you'll see they do astonishing things to retain status, having somehow bound it into their ego and personal brand, but I don't sense the same pull amongst UK business travellers at a high level.

It's not like the situation for hobby GGLs where the first thought in one year was how to qualify the next year for the least spend, in which case we'd have been looking at all sorts of options in the ecosystem I suspect. I've really liked SAF in FB which saves me pointless flying to Sofia and back.

One observation I have been developing is that in fact, if the ecosystem strategy doesn't work well, airlines may be inclined to reduce or remove FF programmes given loads look sort of OK and passengers are paying the fares. This is pretty much what happened at Tesco over recent years. Interesting times anyway.

What does it matter how thry reach that level ? it makes perfect sense to me that those that are the most valuable customers are the ones recognised

I was pretty galled by the Club changes, but when I ran the numbers against my expected 2025/26 flying pattern, it looked like I could still make GGL.

On that basis, and because I don’t expect I’d be able to sustain GGL qualification at the 65k level, I’ve stayed in the game this year. Partly that’s to see whether BA does anything meaningful to improve GGL benefits (yes, I know, probably a fool’s errand).

How my behaviour has changed:

- More likely to complain when BA misses on the basics (Group 0 being diluted, no Wi Fi, seat defects, etc.)
- Shifted some personal trips into BAH bookings to maximise TP accrual (usually by adding a short car hire)
- A bit of “travel engineering” to steer corporate travel onto BA metal where possible

My wife will drop from Gold to Silver and will be relying on my benefits to gift her back to Gold.

I’m Gold for Life and very much in the latter stages of my corporate travel years. If GGL benefits stay where they are, or continue to erode, I won’t be chasing GGL in future.

Baring any surprises, my travel for this year is done and my last flight got me over the GGL requalification line. Below is the breakdown of how I earned my points in 2025/26.

there are plenty of people who spend that kind of money on travel every year, and not purely as a basis to get status. some of that is work travel, a growing proportion is the increase in premium leisure travel. throw in some optimisation thro some BAH bookings or selective oneworld ticketing, and you can make GGL even tho you may not have done previously. plenty of reports in this thread of people who know colleagues making ggl for the first time despite no/minimal changes to their travel pattern. fundamentally it's not wrong that an airline wants to give the trinkets to those who spend the most.

I think you missed the point, or I wasn't able to explain myself clearly.

I don't care how someone reaches status, I was just saying that if the new status holders spend the same as previous years and at the same time ex status holders don't spend anymore with BA, the fact that the number of status customer stays the same is not equal to financial improvement or success...

That's first order thinking though.

The aim of a loyalty scheme is to shift spend one way or another to your own revenue streams. This is money people may or may not spend with you, where individuals bias their choices based on a perceived or real benefit.

If you're a high rolling corporate customer, you'll be making the direct spend anyway. There is no net gain to BA or IAG unless the new status provides increased spend. The "wake up airlines and smell the money" strategy is underpinned by the assumption that having gained higher status it will be valued enough to induce members to engage in opening their wallets to partners. The "BAC" strategy was to reward discretionary spend in the mid tier. Either is perfectly arguable as a strategy. In both cases though you need second order consequences - either the target segment is engaging with the ecosystem for option 1, or the mid tier obediently favour BA and premium tickets without needing you to put effort into a marketing nudge.

The fact that you could game this fairly easily at hobby levels of spend is largely irrelevant, because that was a very thin skim.

You explained yourself just fine.

I agree with you here, but in order to gauge improvement or success we need to know whether ex-status holders were replaced by other passengers, which we don't. My first inclination is that BA would not find it difficult to sell "cheap" business class tickets to premium leisure travellers who are not interested in status. AA is probably happy that I class on Transcons is no longer being used by BAEC TP runners as an additional sector on the ticket with no additional revenue for Joint Business. There are many unknowns, but if we assume that ex-status holders were predominantly flying on "cheap" fares because TPs were awarded based on the cabin, there is no reason to think that those seats won't sell themselves based on price. Just like any other airline attracts unaffiliated passengers for its cheapest tickets. So, if (and that's an if) the number of passengers and the mix of fares are the same, all it means that those on higher fares are getting status and those on the lower fares no longer do. I'd call it a wash rather than improvement or success.

Or to put it in terms BA would understand (should you wish to reply to them) - you listened to airline feedback and have enhanced the way you collect Avios.

I'm just an ignorant retired software engineer so don't have any knowledge of the rarefied atmosphere of economic thinking but my tired old brain can't figure that one out. Why were those TP runner tickets cheap? Wouldn't it be because they couldn't be sold at a higher price? And wouldn't that be related to demand at the time? So if non-TP runners are going to buy them now why wasn't there the demand from that cohort before? And if there was why were they cheap? In short my thesis credibility analyser function is returning false.

I was disappointed with the changes to the club as I was just getting into tier point running and looked to do more in the future. However I will still use BA if its the best option and I am still collecting Avios.

Well, you assume that non-TP runners won't buy them, and I believe that they would. TP runners (and not necessarily TP-runners but many BAEC members in general) would often buy I class tickets months in advance because they were carefully planning their TPs earning throughout the membership year. There is no basis to think that that those I class seats would not have been sold a month or two later to a leisure traveller who does not plan travel 9 months out; it just meant that the status holder got their first because she or he was planning way ahead. Many flights simply do not have those lowest selling classes months in advance, so you need to plan accordingly. And let me correct myself - it is not about price per se, but rather lower selling classes. BA is still offering same very lower fares from multiple markets, and if the thinking is that former BAEC members are not buying them then who is? All I am saying is that I think that "cheap" seats will sell themselves, so BA is simply replacing one set of status holders with another, if it is not attracting additional revenue from new status holders, which is why I called it a "wash."