Should British Airways be flying from airports such as Liverpool and Leeds Bradford?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
That might look an odd question. In the past there have been links from these airports to London Heathrow, which were ditched because the slots could be used more profitably on other routes. But Rob Burgess, founder of the frequent flyer website Head for Points, says that not enough attention is paid to the value of creating loyalty through co-branded credit cards – allowing people who live in areas currently not served by BA to “get a kickback from their spending”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Cawler. It's Thursday the 2nd of April. |
| 0:09.7 | I'm a big fan of the Head for Points frequent flyer website because it comes up with kinds of interesting concepts. |
| 0:18.5 | And that's exactly why I'm here today talking to the founder of Head |
| 0:23.3 | of Points, Rob Burgess. But Rob, the story that you wrote went roughly like this. It used to be the case |
| 0:32.1 | you could fly from Liverpool and from Leeds Bradford and from Teaside Airport to London Heathrow. You can't anymore and that seems reasonable. |
| 0:41.2 | You've got precious slots at Heathrow. You're not making enough money on those domestic links. |
| 0:46.4 | But you were saying actually the airlines need to look beyond just the money that they are earning from operating those |
| 0:57.3 | rights. It's all to do with loyalty. Can you explain? This came about actually after a podcast |
| 1:04.5 | which the ex-CEO of American Airlines did, and he was regretting pulling out of New York. And it wasn't because |
| 1:15.4 | he wasn't making a lot of money flying from New York. They weren't making a great amount of |
| 1:19.1 | money in New York, American Airlines. Too much competition from Rom of a Carrizzda. But when they |
| 1:23.8 | walked away from New York, they walked away from all their co-brands credit card customers. |
| 1:29.7 | Obviously, New York is a very wealthy market, lots of people spending a lot of money on credit cards. |
| 1:35.2 | And in the US, money from credit card companies, from people who use co-branded airline credit cards, is huge. |
| 1:41.8 | To put it in perspective, American Express paid Delta Airlines $8.2 billion |
| 1:46.9 | dollars last year in fees for the use of their name on what co-branded credit cards. It's a huge |
| 1:52.2 | business. And by walking away from New York, American Airlines walked away from a huge amount of money, |
| 1:57.8 | which it wasn't really thinking about because it wasn't flight revenue, |
| 2:06.6 | but it was still going into the overall pot. Now, if you look about it in context of a UK market, |
| 2:14.1 | British Airways parent company, IAG International Airlines Group, the biggest growth part of that company is actually IAG loyalty, or what used to be known as Avios Group, the loyalty arm |
| 2:18.8 | of the business. Not only is it massively profitable in terms of percentage profit margin, |
| 2:24.2 | but it's a very low capital-intensive business, by which I mean, if you're an airline |
... |
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