Year-end musings on British Airways sparked by the new Emirates Birmingham service

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• Rich says:

  27 Dec27 December 09:36

  My last two flights in Club Europe, [inbound flights to Heathrow] had insufficient catering for the passengers.
  Seriously.
  As posted by Raffles, the comparison with Tesco is a valid one, but as BA are behind the Tesco curve and are making good profits at the moment,.. With a steep increase in share price in recent times…. The management probably think they are heading in the right direction.
  Paying Willie £5million and asking your staff to happily accept further pay /allowance cuts and making the product worse will not end well. IMHO.

• David says:

  27 Dec27 December 09:43

  If I’m going east (and I go to Australia, New Zealand and SE Asia a lot for work), BA is low down my list of preferred carriers. Etihad’s probably top of the tree for me (mainly because they go from Manchester, give lounge access with silver status and have been generous to me on the upgrades in the past). But I’ve always found Cathay Pacific and Emirates excellent. Singapore Airlines and Qatar Airways, I’ve only flown once but were of similar standard.

  I like Virgin better than BA too (though their routes east are increasingly limited), and Air New Zealand’s in the same bracket. BA and Qantas are that tier below, above the Chinese airlines, but below the Middle Eastern/ South East Asian airlines. Basically, if going that way, I can’t see why you wouldn’t use your Avios to book a Qatar Airways/ Cathay Pacific/ Malaysia Airlines flight instead. Save BA flights for going west…

• Stupot says:

  27 Dec27 December 09:46

  What BA Open Day??
  I’ve been a loyal ( and perhaps these days, misguided) BAEC member since 1994, and Gold continuously for the last five years and I’ve never heard of a BA Open Day.
  Anyone have any ideas – even though it’s now been canned?

  • Adam (sigma421) says:

    27 Dec27 December 10:14

    It’s mostly an event for staff and their families (kids get to come in and see what mum or dad does all day) and an attempt to build relations with the local community.
    It was scrapped, explicitly to help BA towards making £1.3bn in profit (or whatever their target is).

• Gray says:

  27 Dec27 December 09:49

  It’s difficult to know what BA can do. It’s a predatory pricing strategy from the gulf carriers (whose owners have extremely deep pockets). BA can sit tight and lose customers on service quality; cut prices, lose money year-after-year & go out of business; or invest heavily and collapse under the debt. Its only competitive advantage is its large number of slots at Heathrow, which means it has about 15 years before its inevitable final decline when new capacity is added there.

  • Paul says:

    27 Dec27 December 10:31

    I don’t agree, BA are the architects of of their own downfall and BA have for many years used predatory pricing to steal passengers from Europe. They have had to do so as eastbound the competition is significant ranging from Middle East to far eastern airlines who have invested in products and services. BA myopic response was to focus on the USA. Even on this market AA saw the light and they are hoovering up BA passengers in their droves thanks to a great seat in business class.
    I wouldn’t give BA 5 years, they don’t have that long to respond. They are being saved by the BAEC but just as soon as AA or CX or EK etc offer a tesco type deal for collectionl and family accounts BA is stone dead.

    • LondonTraveller says:

      27 Dec27 December 10:42

      BA and American operate a joint-venture across the North Atlantic and the radical improvement in American’s product is actually a consequence of the joint-venture with American. BA insisted that American upgrade its business class product to fully flat beds.

      It’s also a matter of public record that BA is working on a new business class seat so Raffles’ assertion that BA will have the worst seat of any European airline is probably incorrect.

      • Rob says:

        27 Dec27 December 12:17

        We are looking at a new seat which appear in 2018 and just on the A350, admittedly with a potential to roll it out elsewhere.

        • squiils says:

          27 Dec27 December 15:55

          Being as there are still old cw seats out there, it’ll be well into the 2020’s before the entire fleet has the new seat. By which time the UAE carriers will have set the bar even higher than their current offerings.

        • Mark says:

          28 Dec28 December 02:18

          I have a real concern that the new seat will actually be worse based on the indications so far.

          Despite issues such as the lack of direct isle access / others having to step over your feet, I do find the existing hard product very comfortable.

          An ‘innovative’ new seat that seemingly offers an upright seat or flat bed and nothing in between is not an improvement in my book even if it does have direct isle access for every seat.

    • Rob says:

      27 Dec27 December 12:19

      The AA / BA joint venture means that it doesn’t make any difference if passengers swap BA for AA. All the money that BA, AA, Finnair and Iberia get from North American routes goes into a big joint pot and is then shared out between them (admittedly via a formula I have never seen).

      • RIcatti says:

        28 Dec28 December 16:45

        I still find it worthwhile to check aa.com for North American bookings. AA follows BA sales. More flexibility and possible to find cheaper routings (depending on where in the US one goes).

• Andy says:

  27 Dec27 December 10:37

  But are the Middle Eastern carriers really much better in economy? Read all the terrible reviews on Skytrax for QR’s 787’s. Emirates & Etihad 777’s are 3-4-3 where as BA is 3-3-3. If you are going to Asia is it really worth a longer flight with a connection in a narrower seat just because the service & food might be a bit better?

  • Stu says:

    27 Dec27 December 10:59

    Yes, they are and yes it is

    Flown QR to SGN and HND from Paris this year

    Legroom on the 787 is tighter then the A340 but still manageable (I am 6.2 and the 787 is on DOH-HND 10hrs). The recline is substantial. Nice little amenity pouch (the toothbrushes come in very handy), blanket, always good service and good choice of food (w menu) in economy. And going from Paris = save £200 on an economy seat to Japan

    Would choose QR over BA again, no brainer for me

• Eastland says:

  27 Dec27 December 10:48

  Going to defend this on one basis- with the 2-4-1 it’s still great for people like me. We wouldn’t pay to go business or first. We spend the £10k in the AmEx without trying, but would not reach enough Avios/similar in a year to fly first without the 2-4-1. The only way we would ever enjoy first/business is using BA & the 2-4-1.
  For me and the wife it’s a wonderful way to make our yearly holiday special. BA first class (when not costing me hard earned cash) is wonderful.
  That said if I see a 2-4-1 appear on a creditcard for any of the big Middle East carriers I will be trying that out in a heartbeat!

  • Mark says:

    28 Dec28 December 03:10

    I agree in that is great for the likes of you and me to obtain a more comfortable flying experience once or twice a year at a reduced price.

    Yes, you still have to pay the taxes and fees, plan well ahead and be flexible on dates and destinations, but for those who can it is still a very attractive proposition.

    However BA’s competitiveness in the market is another question entirely, without which that particular gravy train cannot last indefinitely.

• Tim says:

  27 Dec27 December 11:22

  If BA were competitive with Ryanair and easyJet on routes and prices, almost everyone would still choose BA. More than that, they would pay a premium for BA whether justified or not. This is a huge unexploited commercial advantage.

  Much as the Middle Eastern airlines are doing, BA should start taking up spare capacity across the UK before it is all gone. New airports and runways are always going to be so contentious that the extra capacity they bring will always be behind the curve. BA is doomed for as long as it’s business model involves a single hub in a shared airport which there is no further capacity.

  Why not 20 hubs? Or no hubs and focus on point-to-point? Why not build their own 4-runway private airport near a proposed HS2 line? For the vast majority of air travellers, Heathrow and Gatwick are such a major inconvenience to reach that BA doesn’t even enter the equation.

  BA is a legacy airline with structural legacy problems. Continuous contractions and cutbacks to deliver a short-term profit an exit strategy.

  • Tim says:

    27 Dec27 December 11:25

    Continuous contractions and cutbacks to deliver a short-term profit _is_ an exit strategy.

  • Will says:

    27 Dec27 December 12:19

    I actually think you vastly underestimate the logic behind retreating to Heathrow and Gatwick.

    Almost all premium uk passengers (read high margin) fly from these airports and given that they already had lots of Heathrow slots and we’re losing money it’s entirely sensible to go for the low hanging fruit, retreat back into a hub and focus on making it profitable where you have advantages.

    Frankly there are enough people in London with money these days who largely through a housing explosion regard a business/first ticket as an acceptable way to spend £3+k and a lack of brand recognition outside of British Airways or Virgin that I think BA has plenty of life left regardless of the product.

    And for that I could blame the ease with which much of London has become incredibly wealthy over the last 15 years without backing it up with productivity – fools and money and all that.

• LondonTraveller says:

  27 Dec27 December 12:02

  Passengers from UK regional cities bypassing Heathrow to fly to their final destinations via other hubs is nothing new. Passengers have been flying from regional cities via Amsterdam, Frankfurt etc for decades. And all the signs are that its the carriers at these hubs (KLM and Lufthansa), as well as Singapore Airlines are the ones that are losing traffic to the Middle Eastern carriers.

  Most business travellers are time sensitive and most will choose a direct option over a one-stop if they can. 60% of BA long-haul traffic is London point-to-point.

  Talk of BA building multiple hubs across the UK is frankly fanciful. Lufthansa seems to be pulling back from multiple hubs in Germany and arguably the wider Lufthansa group has too many hubs too close together, each without a clear and unique purpose.

  Finally, as for BA being an airline beset by structural problems, if you compare its performance against other European legacies over the past five years, it has done an infinitely better job of reforming itself compared to Air France and Lufthansa and is far better placed to compete.

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