Forbes magazine asks “Did British Airways make one cut too many?”
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The website of Forbes magazine published an interesting article yesterday on the current state of British Airways. It is surprisingly accurate – by the standards of mainstream publications when reporting on airline and frequent flyer issues – and worth a read.
Here are a couple of quotes:
British Airways since its turnaround in the late ’80s has been generally considered a top league airline, innovating seats that turn into beds in both first and business class, and laying on services such as arrivals lounges serving hot breakfast, providing weary travelers showers while having their suits pressed. It offers sit down dining in its lounges before flights, enabling passengers to have more time to sleep.
and
Implementing [buy on board] has not been smooth. A week after launching its version of “buy-on-board” service for its domestic and European flights that require its top-tier frequent fliers to pay for food and drinks and charges for even tea, coffee, soft drinks and bottled water, the airline is having challenges. BA’s Twitter account and internet forums …….. have passengers and crew telling of flight attendants not able to serve the entire cabin, only getting to a few rows, payment machines not working, and only a couple sandwiches loaded for the entire plane. In yet more cases, no food or drinks were loaded at all. Flight attendants from business class sometimes have to help sell food in the back, impacting service to its premium passengers. Teething pains maybe? Reportedly, cabin crew can’t give out food or drinks during delays for service recovery.
Amusingly, whilst Head for Points is not mentioned (come on, Doug!), a quote I posted on FlyerTalk is used:
One poster on internet forum FlyerTalk wrote of the cumulative impact of the cuts. “I know that no-one will flounce off purely on the back of BOB (buy-on-board), but everyone has a breaking point somewhere and the loss of free G’n’T may be it for many,” the member who goes by the name Raffles posted.
(A quick search shows that I have never used the word ‘flounce’ in almost 5000 HFP articles, which shows how I change my writing style when the end product is not for this site!)
There are some great extracts from the BA Twitter feed that are well worth a read!
You can read the full Forbes article here.
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There are two official British Airways American Express cards:

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