EXCLUSIVE: Alex Cruz on upcoming changes to Avios and British Airways Executive Club

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• Paul says:

  26 Mar26 March 06:36

  So revenue based earning and spending on the way! Not the best start to the week.
  For an airline with awful premium products I would have thought that the IT to make the changes he greets to was the least of his problems. This move would remove the only remaining reason to fly BA.

  • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

    26 Mar26 March 06:40

    so the airlines and hotels spend all this time getting people onto programmes and then make these moves that drive them away.

    hotels want to move away from the model of using OTAs but they offer negligible benefits.
    airlines see loyalty in customers paying more than they can elsewhere. but that won’t exist if the perks keep getting eroded.

    • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

      26 Mar26 March 06:43

      i’ll qualify the hotel comment by saying that generally hotel chains are more expensive and that on many, the prices are more expensive directly, hence how many have removed BRGs or do not honour them. the best they can offer is free wifi and breakfasts.

  • John says:

    26 Mar26 March 07:06

    The only reason you fly BA is because you want Avios? I earn and spend most of my Avios on airlines other than BA, and I fly BA when it has cheap tickets (admittedly, not that often) on routes that are convenient to me.

    • Alex says:

      26 Mar26 March 11:50

      No, you stick to an airline to get status. The idea is that you can fast-track security, choose your seat and access a lounge (nobody cares if home-airport lounges are overcrowded or not so good, you don’t arrive 2hrs early at Heathrow if you can fast-track security).

      I did a TP run at the weekend to reach Silver for this. They’re the home airline in the UK, they fly to the most destinations, and status has a way of getting you perks and making travelling a lot nicer.

      If you compare the product to other airlines (ME3 for example), it’s subpar, but their competition in the UK is Ryanair, Easyjet, Flybe etc. They’re not substandard in that light!

      • BTC says:

        26 Mar26 March 14:40

        For regional BA flyers, especially ones that aren’t right beside an airport, you do end up in the “home” or Heathrow lounges for a while, as you have to factor in BAs habit of culling domestics when there’s problems!

• pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

  26 Mar26 March 06:37

  forget ashley giles, this is the king of spin. the propaganda machine is in overdrive. this isn’t about making more profit and giving less value for avios? no, this is about giving the customer want he wants – he can now book whatever he wants so long as he pays loads – they have sensed a new opportunity. someone who has no concept of true value – now value of something they have finally learned is the price that someone is willing to pay. and that’d be fine if they didn’t have any competition.

  <>

  the answer to the customer is as few as possible, and to the airline, as much as possible. this new inventory will just be an excuse to make things available that are unaffordable for the majority of the customer, while reducing the percentage of available redemptions at affordable rates. they can keep saying they have more available but ignore the fact that it’s a stealth rise.

• Susan says:

  26 Mar26 March 06:50

  “We don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver. We prefer to under-promise and over-deliver.”

  Based on Flyertalk BAEC he may find those words don’t mean what he thinks they mean.

  • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

    26 Mar26 March 06:54

    he sounds like he’s talking about pizzas. and you don’t always get what you want. sometimes your first preference is gone. “chicken or beef?” >> “i’m vegetarian” >> “beef it is sir”..

    • Alex says:

      26 Mar26 March 11:51

      You should let them know if you have dietary requirements. They honour them, but you have to add it to your booking.

  • startupflyer says:

    26 Mar26 March 07:14

    This line made me chuckle out loud. One thinks Mr Cruz has a somewhat back to front view on BA promises and technological ability.

    Boarding groups being my new fav. Flying yesterday with my wife & son, all on the same booking and we got different boarding group numbers. It’s not a massive jump in logic to assume people on the same booking might, um, board together? Ground staff were fine with us boarding together, unsurprising given how used to coping with various IT glitches they must be.

• Simon says:

  26 Mar26 March 06:54

  Hmm, the casual Avios user will like this. My boss last week mentioned she’d used the miles from 2 flights to LA to save a few hundred pounds on her family holiday in Europe this summer by using part pay. Inwardly I winced about whether that was the best value use of the points but she was just happy to get “something for nothing”

  And I quite like the Delta model with pricing tiers and seats always available, and very clear IT so you know what the availability is and what the base price on that route is. When my father has used his SkyMiles to book me on flights to see him, it’s meant some odd routes if that’s where the cheap redemptions were, but that’s fine.

  But this only works for him because high interchange fees make it easy to earn gazillions of points. I’d love to know how he thinks earning will work without that. It will end up being like the coop membership card…

  • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

    26 Mar26 March 06:59

    i agree the casual users will like this. some guy at work was telling me how he’d saved 450 pounds by spending a mouth watering number of air miles to reduce his economy flights to washington to 800 pounds each. i didn’t even think it was possible to be ripped off so badly. this is the customer they want.. “they pay as much as they want”.. perfect for one another

    • John says:

      26 Mar26 March 07:02

      You are not ripped off just because you don’t take advantage of the biggest possible discount.

      • Peter K says:

        26 Mar26 March 07:29

        I agree. A lot of Tesco clubcard customers use them for face value too get money off their shopping and they are happy with that. The fact that they could get 2-4x the value using them on one of the boost options does not mean they were ripped off using them at the lower value.
        We would rightly feel ripped off however if we earned avios expecting to pay Hong Kong 120k avios and suddenly the cheapest option became 200k avios.

  • callum says:

    26 Mar26 March 07:17

    That sounds good in theory, but I can foresee varying pricing levels being used to effectively increase the price. I.e. you CAN fly London to Paris for 4000 Avios, but the majority of the seats will now be loaded at 6,000 etc.

    • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

      26 Mar26 March 07:20

      that’s the availability on qatar’s frequent flyer programme. 99% is double airmiles, 1% is standard airmiles. so a return to asia should be 150k, but is more likely to cost 300k.

• John says:

  26 Mar26 March 07:01

  So exactly the same ideas and spin as came from Hilton last year, even down to the “points slider”.

  The bit bolded by Rob (a number of airlines around the world have changed the way in which they collect points and redeem points to be much more value driven) merely shows that BA has no ideas of its own any more, and just wants to follow everyone else except it doesn’t even do things as well as others.

  • pablo fonseca domingo panto says:

    26 Mar26 March 07:07

    qatar have the same deal on their frequent flyer programme.
    the qatar forum of flyertalk is full of people moaning about there being no redemption availability, but there is loads of availability for double miles.. and they’re also slider there if you don’t have enough miles. cruz is just taking the qatar thing and applying it to BA. one of the few good things about BA was the frequent flyer programme and now they want to replicate qatar’s very unpopular programme.

    • memesweeper says:

      26 Mar26 March 23:22

      Well, to be fair to BA, I think what’s being proposed is the ability to use Avios as a substitute for cash for any/all services. That’s not the same as a double-price redemption. Proof of the pudding is yet to come though!

• Martin says:

  26 Mar26 March 07:19

  The only reason I choose BA over other airlines is the use of the companion voucher and Avios to fly club world or first which for me is the cheapest way I can fly in premium cabins. Devaluation of Avios further for me, a casual flyer but high CC spender, will mean i’ll explore my options with more scrutiny and more than likely ditch my BA card and possibly/probably use other airlines

  • Paul says:

    26 Mar26 March 07:35

    What will be interesting is how the likes of visa MasterCard and amex react. This will affect their customer base too, as a major devaluation and dumping casual, premium leisure flyers may influence how some choose their credit card.
    Remember this may come in at a time when amex is making changes and possibly eliminating the free BAPP card for long term holders of the platinum card.

• Dev says:

  26 Mar26 March 07:23

  This sounds like it’s officially game over for me. If it’s revenue based earning, I am going to ditch BAEC and spread the love to airlines based on service quality and convenience, and forget about loyalty programs.

• Alan says:

  26 Mar26 March 07:27

  Oh crap…

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