It was worse than that......
BA made a promise to a group of business travellers that had held gold cards for some time. It was that after X years, (I think it was 5) of holding a gold card earnt by travelling with BA, they could have a permanent Silver card.
Surprise, surprise, they refused to honour that. Therefore, lots of prople who had used BA for rather a lot of flights suddenly found that BA told terminological inexactitudes and had become thoroughly dishonourable.
As a previous poster said, as an anti-marketing device, you couldn't make it up.