Connecting passengers are vital to BA's long-haul success. If they abandoned short-haul they would lose at least 28 million passengers connecting to their long-haul services.
Well yes, except if a 2013 Easyjet document is to be believed, "long-haul feeder" routes only account for around 5% of the EU short-haul market, and that only 15% of that 5% is Business class capacity..... so we're basically talking about 0.75% of the EU-short haul market being "long-haul feeder" capacity (2011 figures).... i.e. 4.5 million seats out of the 600 million.
Given there are roughly 42 "main" airlines operating long haul routes (sum of OneWorld plus StarAlliance members)... BA will probably loose some of those 4.5 million to their competitors ...
And that's before we start writing off people who're only flying premium because they're using Avios or they're on a corporate deal.
Of course BA want all the passengers they can get ... BA only publicly publish (as far as I can tell) overall pax figures... which was roughly 32 million in 2010.... so if we generously assume premium cabin space is on average 40%, that's 13 million premium passengers.... which means BA probably only get about 10-20% of their premium passengers off the feeder routes.
Of course I've only focused on premium passengers above, because as we all know, that's where the money is made to pay for the cattle in the back ...
(
The aforementioned Easyjet document is here ... the figures I refer to in paragraph one are on page 20)