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A guest BA post by The Rt Hon Nigel Evans, ex MP and Deputy Speaker of the Commons

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Rob writes: we very rarely accept guest articles on Head for Points. However, when politician Nigel Evans – who spent 32 years as MP for Ribble Valley and was a Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons until the last election – offered to write about the British Airways Executive Club changes, I was interested.

What makes Nigel’s piece relevant is that it shows that unhappiness with British Airways runs deep and that interest in the topics we cover on HfP goes far beyond the hardcore frequent flyer community.

As Nigel said to me:

“I was chair of a number of a few committees, and was a delegate to the Council of Europe which took me extensively around the world . Needless to say I am Gold for Life with BA and at one stage was Gold on all three alliances simultaneously.

Whilst I will be unaffected by the BA changes – other than a beneficiary from deserted lounges in 12 months times – I am incensed by the cavalier way in which BA is treating its loyalty members.”

Over to Nigel. I have edited his piece and any errors are probably mine:

Nigel Evans

“They say that no one is as deaf as the one who chooses not to hear. British Airways whispered its changes to its well established and well loved loyalty programme during the Christmas break. It came as an unwelcome gift which would have been best left unwrapped. One can only assume there was no focus group played out with current members of BA Executive Club which would have quickly put this plan out of its misery.

British Airways is changing its loyalty programme to reward money spent rather than frequency of flying. There are nuances to it, but in essence the cost of getting elite status with BA is going to cost a huge amount more, in some cases by a factor of eight or more.

My friends who have been blindly loyal to British Airways for decades are in deep shock. They weren’t over surprised about the new tier points being awarded on revenue but they were traumatised by the huge increases required to have their loyalty recognised. Many have said to me they cannot retain their current status in the new scheme and are simply surrendering their planned trips with BA rather than even try.

There are a lot of savvy fliers who have engineered their business and leisure flights around gaining tier recognition with British Airways. A former owner of an airline once told me that frequent fliers have been known to fly in the opposite direction of where they want to go simply to fly with their chosen alliance and earn recognition.

Nigel Evans writes about British Airways

I was recently at a conference in Hampshire and there was only one side discussion of any note – who would people be transferring their loyalty to and which scheme would better reward their loyalty.

One former diplomat told me he had approached Virgin Atlantic to see if it would status match his BA gold card. Not only did they say yes, but they have since officially rolled out their status match with a further incentive of a prize draw for five lucky loyalty refugees to win a million points.

Another British Airways loyalty orphan told me he was switching immediately to Flying Blue on the day that Air France KLM announced its £99 status match. It also appears that Flying Blue is going one better and giving top tier status quietly to Gold Guest List victims. This is the highest level in their scheme and will allow enhanced recognition with extended lounge access to eight of your fellow travellers.

Another savvy frequent flyer texted me yesterday relating to his take on the changes – “I’m done with them”. He is looking at Flying Blue and planning his next BA-free break.

I am now waiting for Star Alliance to smell the stench from the rotting corpse of the BA bombshell and announce a status match offer. The scene is reminiscent of vultures circling above ready to swoop on the remains of an animal dying from, in this case, self inflicted wounds.

I have no doubt that British Airways has thought through these changes – after all they hide behind members feedback as their justification for the new scheme. I have no doubt some members have complained about lounges being crowded or the aircraft boarding by group number being a bit like the rush through the doors at the Harrod’s New Year’s sale. I have no doubt that the new scheme will rectify these problems but not in the way BA has intended.

Another friend is going to China next month and had already embarked on his loyalty journey with oneworld via BA. He has now taken out Flying Blue membership and taken a tier run to Scandinavia, he has a flight booked in business to Paris and next month will fly with SkyTeam to Shanghai. He would most certainly have booked BA to get him closer to his beloved Gold status but feels that BA have shown him no loyalty and two can dance that tango.

BA faces a big decision. It can plough on with its current proposals which have been universally greeted with total disbelief by the majority of frequent flyers I speak to or they can hear the screeching handbreak turns from former loyal members who are heading to pastures and alliances new.

The one thing I have learnt from my days in business is that the customer is always right and that they also have a choice. Unless British Airways wakes up and smells the Union coffee brewing in their lounges they will – without a doubt – soon be receiving fewer complaints from their incredibly loyal Executive Club members about crowded lounges. It will, unfortunately, be for all the wrong reasons.”

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Comments (336)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Daniel says:
    20 Jan20 January 07:54

    Is he still a “Rt Hon”? He’s not an MP any longer and wasn’t a Privvy Councillor, so he’s plain old “Mr” now.

    Interesting article though – keeps up the pressure on BA.

    • JDB says:
      20 Jan20 January 08:04

      Correct, he should now correctly be termed Mr Nigel Evans.

    • Alex G says:
      20 Jan20 January 08:08

      You’re wrong. He is a Privy Councillor, and therefore a Rt Hon.

    • PeterK says:
      20 Jan20 January 08:20

      Past Privy Council members keep the title for LIFE. I first researched it when I kept seeing Liz Truss continuing to be referred to as ‘The Rt Hon’!

      ‘The members include Cabinet members past and present, the Speaker, the leaders of the main political parties, Archbishops, various senior judges as well as other senior public figures.’

      • ba says:
        20 Jan20 January 08:30

        Your first sentence is not quite right: membership of the Privy Council is itself for life. The honorific follows the membership.

        • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
          20 Jan20 January 09:03

          But the only active members are current cabinet members and even then only a handful attend each meeting. (Which incidentally are always held standing up).

          The last time there was any great number of Privy Counsellors in one place was the King’s Accession Council.

  • BJ says:
    20 Jan20 January 07:57

    The bottom line is that people who pay for a particular service should receive what they pay for, not some randomly watered-down daily variant dependent on the numbers of real or fake elites passing through the airport and flying alongside them. Nothing will rver persuade me otherwise, cash should alwayd trump loyalty and status on a flight by flight basis. I applaud BA efforts to thin out elites. They should go further and segregate access to priority security, lounges and boarding to prioritise can over status. Lifetime status is nonsense and should be immediately abolished for existing and new members. Paying passengers should get what they pay for on a flight by flight basis on every airline they regardless of how frequently they do so.

    • Champignon says:
      20 Jan20 January 08:10

      Leisure travelers with elite status, other than a few highly publicized but unrepresentative “tier point runners,” do in fact pay for front cabin seating with their own funds. That these sort of people would go out of their way to fly a particular carrier, based upon a loyalty scheme, shows the success that can be wrung out of a loyalty program; get people to fly your airline even if it is subpar and even if it means going out of their way.

      Perhaps this doesn’t comport with your existing biases about exactly who benefits from programs like this and at whose expense this comes.

      BA’s decapitation of its former executive club will get you exactly what you thought you wanted, but the service you receive will unfortunately be no better as a result. The formerly-loyal leisure travelers will go on to find a better opportunity, and many or most will be glad to have had their blinders removed.

      • Mr. AC says:
        20 Jan20 January 09:27

        Exactly correct. BAEC was an incredible success – causing meaningful numbers of higher-than-average spenders to fly with BA even when the product and routing is inferior and price higher. That is now over. I look forward to reading about the corporate governance fairly that caused this once people that privy to the process retire or as a HBR case study.

        The only thing that will “improve” for the remaining passengers is the load factor being lower and lounges emptier (assuming BA doesn’t downsize them in T5).

        • JDB says:
          20 Jan20 January 09:43

          BA will be fairly substantially increasing its lounge capacity at T5. I’m not sure load factors will be greatly affected by this. I would be much more concerned about the impact of the economy on load factors in a year that’s likely to see job losses and many businesses and families squeezed. This will make it rather harder to measure the impact of the TP changes if they are ultimately implemented as planned.

      • BJ says:
        20 Jan20 January 12:10

        I have no problems with loyalty schemes or I would mot be following blogs like HfP. I like to take advantage of them jyst as much as everyone else here. All I am saying is that people who pay cash should get what they pay for and there ecperience should not be diluted as a result of elite benefits such as economy pax overcrowding business lounges, Gold-blocking front row seats etc. Cash not status should be king on a flight by flight basis. Qatar Airways seems to get this, other cariers should join them.

        • Champignon says:
          20 Jan20 January 18:20

          Your comment has merit, if what we were discussing was an airline that executes its mission as well as those in the BA corporate suite seem to think.

          The reality is that the hard product lags and is instituted across the fleet at a snail’s pace, leaving high-paying passengers in the old dormitory club seats but paying for better. Maybe you thought that you could avoid that problem by booking only flights with the new club suite, but then BA changes the aircraft at the last minute and you are back in the dorm, essentially getting a hostel when you paid for the Sofitel.

          So, you thought you could avoid that proposition by paying up for long haul first, and you do that. Then BA has operational problems from bad weather in London or equipment failure, and even though you bought a first class ticket, BA treats you like a homeless person who sleeps under a bridge. Ask me how I know this — it’s happened to me 3X in the last few years.

          Getting status with BA, especially gold status, was the one way around these problems. While they don’t answer their regular phone lines, they do answer the gold line. My own experience was that I got my 3 horrid pending disasters fixed by being able to call BA and have someone answer the phone and fix the problem.

          So I agree with you that BA should give service commensurate with what the passenger paid for. Unfortunately, they don’t. Having a gold card for me was a way around this mess, but without it, I’m going somewhere else, because I don’t like paying large sums for air travel and only to be treated like a cow.

    • Flier33 says:
      20 Jan20 January 19:20

      Sounds like you just described low-cost airlines business model.

  • jj says:
    20 Jan20 January 07:59

    Funny how the main thread on the Executive Club has nearly 4000 posts, almost all of which hate on BA. As soon as a former Tory MP says the same thing, the community here seems to thing he’s a privileged twit who’s deeply wrong and has no right to comment.

    I smell groupthink and prejudice.

    • collarbone666 says:
      20 Jan20 January 09:59

      Excellent comment Mr jj.

    • Nomad312 says:
      20 Jan20 January 12:11

      I don’t think many people on here have said he’s wrong or has no right to comment. The point is that he’s been given the platform of an article on HfP while saying almost nothing new to what has said on the comments threads elsewhere on this site. On that basis he certainly has been “privileged”.

      I get that his status gives this story more prominence and his terribly cliched and clunky writing style does make you appreciate the much more tightly written articles that usually appear in this space but as a source of insight the article serves little purpose.

    • BJ says:
      20 Jan20 January 12:28

      He was a public servant, his constituents and the wider public have every right to scrutinise and question the public interest value of his travels and benefits he received from them. He was mot alone, their have been other high profile cases covered by tge media such as ‘Miles Martin’ and ‘Air Moles Andy’ thus the issues are not unique to specific political parties or to politicians. As far as ‘m concerned he’s just another elite amongst thousands that BA and other airlines allow to (unfairly IMO) potentially adversely impact premium fare paying pax.

  • NigelthePensioner says:
    20 Jan20 January 08:00

    BA blindly carry on digging whilst having no idea how a JCB is fully controlled. They are within a whisker of a gas pipe and there is about to be a huge explosion. The full crassness of their loyalty decisions won’t be seen until 1st April 2026 and if this foolhardy scheme lasts that long, they will be ignorant of the delay in the consequence of their stupidity and try to say that the scheme has not flopped as passenger numbers remain “buoyant”. The absolute lie that this whole hair brained scheme is at the request of members is beyond credibility.
    Grow up BA and get a competent board in.

  • Mark says:
    20 Jan20 January 08:04

    The changes will be positive to me as I have no status and all J class will be redemptions. Emptier lounges, fewer status passengers hoovering up the best seats, more people using other airlines so better availability. Also, may put BA off from introducing revenue based redemptions for a while longer.

  • S says:
    20 Jan20 January 08:16

    “Traumatised”?? Give over.

  • Charlie says:
    20 Jan20 January 08:18

    I was hoping for a considered and insightful analysis from a former politician and businessperson – but all we got was just another rather emotional rant.

  • Russell says:
    20 Jan20 January 08:19

    This reads like a Daily Mail rant piece. They’ve changed their loyalty scheme, not set fire to an orphanage. “The stench of the rotting corpse”…. Jesus wept. If we’re having guest writers, can you bring Barry back please?

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