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Almost exactly seven months have passed since British Airways announced that it would move the elite earnings side of its frequent flyer program to a revenue-based system and I have to admit that I’m still not really sure what the airline is doing.
As I’ve discussed before, the decision to move to a revenue-based model has meant that earning British Airways mid-tier and top-tier elite status is now considerably more expensive than it was in the past, but the airline doesn’t appear to have done anything to encourage its flyers to dig deeper into their pockets and to pay a lot more for what they have been used to receiving.
I have no issue with British Airways doing whatever it wants to do with its frequent flyer program as the decision to dramatically increase the cost of earning British Airways Gold status will have very little effect on me (I’ll be just fine over at Finnair Plus and if that program changes for the worse, I’ll still have my lifetime mid-tier AAdvantage status to fall back upon) and I’m more than happy to admit that I have no great insight into the airline’s finances, but I can’t help but feel that British Airways may have underestimated just how valuable its old frequent flyer program was to its overall success.
I’ll explain what I mean by that a little later, but before I do that, I need to lay some groundwork.
British Airways has a quality issue
If you’re going to ask your customers to pay a significant amount of money for whatever it is that you’re offering, that offering will need to be good, and when you’re asking customers to pay what British Airways is asking them to pay, it probably needs to be very good.
But it isn’t.
If you take a look at most parts of the British Airways product, there’s not much that stands out as being particularly good or great.
If you take a look at the airline’s IT systems, for example, they’re useless.
The airline’s desktop site frequently returns odd error messages, it often tells flyers they have no bookings when they have plenty, and the number of errors we see within the “manage my booking” section of the site is laughable.
Half of the time you can’t even log in, and when you can, you often can’t make or manage a booking.
The British Airways app isn’t much better.
It lacks a lot of basic functionality (it won’t even automatically refresh your bookings list when you login) and it’s plagued with almost as many errors as the desktop site.
If you want to see the extent of the mess that British Airways is passing off as an IT system, just check out this thread on FlyerTalk (over 1,000 comments in 2025 alone).
Yes, British Airways keeps telling customers that it’s spending millions on new IT infrastructure, but aside from a new front end to the desktop site, there is very little evidence (so far) that the airline’s IT issues are being addressed.
Things aren’t much better at the airport.
The quality of the lounges at BA’s home hub (Heathrow) is poor and the quality of the lounges outside of Heathrow is (mostly) even worse. The food on offer in the Heathrow lounges is, at best, mediocre, and the Heathrow check-in desks can be chaotic.
Sure, if you have access to the First Wing (First Class flyers and OneWorld Emerald elites) and if you have access to the Concorde Room (First Class flyers and Gold Guest List elites) traveling from Heathrow is a little better than it is for most people, but if you want someone to spend £20,000/~$26,600 (net of taxes and fees) for the privilege of Gold elite status, you probably shouldn’t be serving sausages that look like this …
… or eggs that look like this in your “Galleries First” Lounge.
You also probably shouldn’t be asking your Galleries First guests to put up with lavatories that resemble something you’d find in woefully underfunded and run-down state hospital and which can smell just as bad.
They’re disgusting.
You would hope that an airline that wants to attract premium flyers would make sure that things are better onboard, but that’s often not the case either.
The long-haul Business Class catering has been poor for a long time (British Airways even tried to make it worse during the ill-advised “Brunchgate” fiasco), and the roll out of the Club Suite has been so slow that Business Class flyers on a lot of routes (including premium routes like London – Los Angeles) still have to suffer the antiquated Club World seats that were first conceived during the reign of Alfred the Great.
Is flying in these seats better then flying in Premium Economy or Economy Class? Yes, of course it is. But that’s not the point.
This is ancient rubbish that British Airways is offering while continuing to ask flyers to pay premium prices.
After all of this, you would hope that British Airways would at least make sure that it offers a reliable service, wouldn’t you? Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.
The airline’s Airbus A380s may be an AvGeeks dream, but they’re often a flyers nightmare because they’re about as reliable as an Alfa Romeo from the 1970s.
These aircraft are forever breaking down and causing delays and flight cancellations, so much so that flyers who pay attention to these things are often doing their best to book away from the airline’s A380 where possible (check out this Flyertalk thread for an insight into the British Airways A380 issues).
Do the A380s comprise a significant percentage of the BA fleet? No, there are just 11 “active” BA A380s. But when you’re operating them on premium-heavy routes on which you’re charging an incredible amount of money for a premium cabin seat (e.g. Los Angeles, Johannesburg and Singapore), it doesn’t look good if you’re often having to tell your high-fare passengers that they may not be flying when they were expecting to fly because you can’t maintain your aircraft.
The optics are terrible.
The duct tape
What everything I’ve written so has been leading to is this: For a lot of people, the British Airways Executive Club (the old frequent flyer program) was the duct tape that held the British Airways offering together.
Because the Executive Club (BAEC) wasn’t too bad, a lot of people were prepared to overlook the poor lounges, the poor IT, the poor long-haul food, and the A380 reliability issues and continue flying with British Airways.
For this group of flyers, the benefits they were earning from the BAEC outweighed the negatives that come with flying with British Airways and so British Airways continued to rake in their money.
But what about now?
Now that the BAEC has been turned into the British Airways Club (BAC), most people who don’t have their flights paid for by their employer have three choices:
- Hand over significantly more money than before for the same mediocre offering
- Accept they won’t have worthwhile elite status going forward and continue flying with British Airways
- Look for greener pastures
Options (1) and (2) aren’t particularly appealing, are they?
The thing that quite a few people reading this article may not know is that British Airways doesn’t operate any international flights from UK airports that don’t have “London” in their name.
In fact, almost all of BA’s flights depart from London Heathrow and London Gatwick, and this means that anyone based outside of the London Area (or outside the South East of England) has to connect in London if they want to fly internationally with British Airways.
Yes, this even applies when they’re flying super short-haul routes to neighboring countries like Ireland and France, and it’s why a lot of Brits call British Airways “London Airways”.
In the past (i.e. while the BAEC was still in place), a lot of flyers from cities around the UK would put up with having to connect in London because they were focused on earning valuable British Airways elite status and flying through London helped them achieve that aim.
But what are these people going to do now if they’ve been priced out of earning the elite status that meant so much to them? Where’s the incentive to fly with British Airways?
On short-haul flights, why wouldn’t they fly with the likes of Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, or a variety of other European airlines and avoid a connection completely?
They could even choose to fly with one of the “low cost” carriers and possible save some money while still avoiding a connection.
On long-haul flights where a connection is going to be required regardless of which airline one of these flyers chooses, what is there now to persuade them to fly BA and connect in London rather than flying with Air France (and connecting in Paris), flying with KLM (and connecting in Amsterdam), flying with Lufthansa (and connecting in Frankfurt or Munich), flying with Emirates (and connecting in Dubai), or flying with Qatar Airways (and connecting in Doha)?
What is there to stop flyers from outside the Southeast region of the UK from jumping ship to one of the European loyalty programs and pushing all their travel spending away from British Airways?
With the BAEC now replaced by the far more exclusive (expensive) BAC, the only ways British Airways can now persuade flyers from outside the Southeast region of the UK to fly with them (rather than with a competitor) is to either offer the lowest fares or to offer a better product.
Both of those are measures that would cost BA money, and that’s more than a little ironic given that the BAC was introduced in the belief that it would make the airline more money and not cause it to have to cut fares or spend money to compete.
A miscalculation or not?
I think the airline may have underestimated just how many flyers were choosing the airline over its competitors because of the benefits offered by the British Airways Executive Club and I think it may have miscalculated just how many of its customers have other choices of airlines that would work just as well for them (possibly even better).
In a nutshell and based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like BA believes that it can afford to lose a lot of travelers to its competitors without harming its profits because the population of travelers that sticks with the airline (mostly people who don’t pay for their own flights) will pick up the financial slack and will happily pay more for the same mediocre product.
This has to be what the airline believes as it hasn’t announced any new incentives to encourage new customers to come onboard (that would involve spending money and BA really doesn’t like doing that unless it absolutely has to), so with no new customers coming through the door, it will have to be existing customers who keep the profits heading in the right direction.
To be fair, it looks like the financial markets have chosen to believe this is what will happen as well because the IAG share price (IAG is the parent company of BA) is currently ~23% higher than it was at the start of the year, and who am I to argue with the financial markets?
The fallout
The fact is that I don’t think we’ve yet seen the full fallout from the changes to the British Airways frequent flyer program.
Most of BA’s Gold and Silver elites still have their status (earned though the old program) intact and will continue to enjoy the benefits of that status until the end of April 2026, so for the time being, they continue have an incentive to fly with British Airways and its OneWorld partners.
It’s only once BA’s current crop of elite flyers drop down a level or lose elite BA elite status completely that we’ll see just how much of an effect the changes to the frequent flyer program will really have.
Without meaningful elite status and with little hope of earning meaningful elite status without dropping a large bag of cash into BA’s lap, I suspect that a significant number of people will be off to pastures new, and it will be interesting to see how (if at all) this will affect the airline’s bottom line.
With no duct tape now holding its offering together, I think that British Airways will “suffer” more then it’s expecting to, but as I’ve already pointed out, that belief doesn’t appear to be shared by the airline or by the financial markets so I guess that means I’ll probably be proven wrong 🙂
