End of BA “Grandfather” tier rights

It seems that buried in the small print of the BA April “Enhancements” was the fact that members who live outside the UK and have very limited access to flight routes operated by BA unless they always fly through London lost there “Grandfather” rights [this is how BA referred to this] when I queried why my tier points needed had increased from 800 to 1500 and right in the middle of my earning year and without any prior notice!
Once again BA are clearly penalising long standing and loyal [over 23 years in my case] passengers whose travel in mainly short haul.
So regrettably after all these years its going to be goodbye to BA and I will switch my business to KLM who have a far fairer scheme and also offer me multiple arrival points in the UK. OK the KLM lounge at Schiphol may not be a patch on the BA “first” lounge at T5 but having said that the T5 “first” lounge is rapidly going downhill.
One day BA will find out to their cost that loosing long standing and loyal customers is not really a very clever idea.

I too have the same issue – 800 to 1,500 to retain Gold. My view is it was good whilst it lasted and I too remember a thread from 3 years or so ago discussing the tier point increase (or equalisation) for European/Overseas based members.

However, I still retain my European address as once or twice a year there are offers available to European members that are not available to UK based members.

Mine ended this month also (I live in Finland). This is despite my BAEC page saying that 800 points were needed for gold until half way through the tier point year and then it jumped to 1500. It would have been nicer to have it change at the start of the tier point year not give me a false target that I spent extra money on to get to 800 points and now realise I could have spent zero pounds with BA this year and still had silver next year.

Why should it be different for european members? to give us some incentive to fly via heathrow. For intra-europe flights especially other airports are much better. 30 minute minimum connection time in munich. no second security check when changing planes. No taking a bus from terminal 3 to terminal 5.

Perhaps those living in the UK don’t realise it but when you fly say helsinki-munich-madrid there is no passport control anywhere and security check only at the helsinki end. That does not happen if you fly via London. And i’ve never flown around in circles waiting to land at frankfurt or munich as you do about 80% of the time when approaching heathrow.

SimonS1 – “people have had over 3 years to adjust their travel habits” – firstly you make the wild assumption that every member knew about this – I most certainly did not and it came as a bolt out of the blue in the middle of my earnings year which starts in early December! :Like RichardB I have been misled into planning my year based on 800 points [which incidentally I earn by paying for a European business class fare before you raise that one!] You also mention Avios which has absolutely nothing to do with Tier points.
In addition, RichardB does have some cushion as he lives in Finland and can enhance his BA card earnings by using Finnair. I live in Norway and nothing has changed. The only BA flights available to me are to Heathrow and nothing has changed over the past 3 years nor likely to in the future. The only other Oneworld partner is Finnair, but I never need to fly there and the BA franchisee Sunair which apparently occasionally flies to Denmark [again not a regular destination of mine] must hold the European record for the most cancelled flights in any one year.
So perhaps you could explain how I could have “adjusted my travel habits” when nothing new has happened to increase the availability of using BA from my home airport and country other than just not bothering to use BA at all?
Hopefully you have now understood why BA would incentivise the number of tier points for people like me who do not have ready access to the vast number of BA / former BMI and soon Aer LIngus flights that residents of the UK can enjoy!

Logically speaking, someone residing outside Britain area would;
1) Benefit from lower fares on BA, particularly ex-EU ports. Therefore the cost of hitting the tier points thresholds is lower than a UK domiciled pax
2)Their BA flights would require them to backtrack to LHR (inconvenience = lower fares), which results in the ability to earn more tier points.
As such the old lower tier points requirement is irrational.

the only other program that had different levels for Gold that I know of, was Lufthansa’s Miles and More, where German based members needed 130,000 miles and all others (including Swiss) needed just 100,000. It seems LH lowered this to 100,000 miles for everyone as I cannot see a difference anymore on the German website.

My point exactly Richard – if you choose the indirect route via London for a European flight then you get TPs on both sets of flights. Why do you need a lower threshold as well?

BA makes its money on long haul routes so I think you are right in saying they are primarily interested in the connection traffic from Europe.