British Airways frequent flyers get more benefits – due to a lack of confidence in business travel?

British Airways have announced some increased perks for high tier members of the Executive Club. This is due to delight frequent flyers as previously restricted facilities are open to more people.

I have to wonder if this is a sign that the oneworld alliance carrier is not confident in business travel returning. It certainly might be a factor.

Executive Club’s New Benefits

Pre-flight dining is offered in various British Airways lounges in North America. The reasoning behind this is so passengers can eat on the ground and go straight to sleep once on board. You can find these in places like New York, Boston, Washington DC and Chicago due to the relatively short flights to London Heathrow.

Previously only First Class or Club World business class passengers could use the pre-flight dining. Anyone flying down the back of the bus, even if you had a high tier Executive Club card, was ineligible. This has now changed, which is excellent! Silver members, Gold members and those above can now access the pre-flight dining regardless of class of travel. I experienced the dining in New York a while ago and there’s plenty of nice food on offer. The other benefit is for Gold Guest List frequent flyers, who will all now be able to access the Concorde Room at New York and London Heathrow, regardless of how many tier points they have earned. Now that is a very nice additional perk indeed, as previously you needed to earn at least 5,000 Tier Points for this.

A Lack Of Confidence?

These pre-flight dining facilities were usually quite busy in the past, which is one reason why they were restricted to people flying in first class or business class. Clearly that has fundamentally changed, but what is surprising is that BA must expect the change to last quite some time.

There is no way anyone would appreciate getting the perks and then having them taken away in a year, so this could be quite long term. Clearly with the Boeing 747-400s having been removed from the fleet, a great deal of business class capacity has been removed as well. Having several jumbos departing from New York meant a lot of people for the pre-flight dining, which is clearly not going to happen to the same extent in future.

Overall Thoughts

Fantastic news for the Gold Guest List, Gold and Silver frequent flyers in the British Airways Executive Club. I almost feel like I’d like to fly economy class to and from the USA just to maximise my benefits in the future.

Even so, the great news is tempered by my curiosity around the why of it all. I can’t believe it’s solely to lure people back into the sky, so someone has clearly read the tea leaves and believes things might not bounce back as hard as before. Time will tell!

What you do think will happen or the reasons behind this decision? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image via British Airways.