[capetonianm]

Thanks LP. I wasn’t aware of that site. I was just making a list of the various airlines to call tomorrow to call for quotes (AF, LH, LX, KL, VS, possibly IB) as they’ve decided they don’t need to go via London. Unless the group insist on BA, someone else will get the business.

Typical Swiss, they make it so easy. It took me less than a minute to get a coherent response and a competitive quote on that site. Meanwhile, back at BA ….. someone promised me at 0900 that they’d call me ‘by lunchtime’ today. Even if we assume that Cruz has imposed his culture onto BA to extend to Spanish lunchtimes, I think I can safely assume that promise has been broken.

Thanks again!

[capetonianm]

BA do not appear to want the business as they have not called me back, and when I did finally get through to someone in their group department who had a brain cell and was able to speak English, he told me that they will only deal with the travel trade and won’t even give a quote to someone who is not an IATA agency. He was very pleasant and polite and understood my point of view but ‘computer says no’ or ‘rules is rules’.

As someone who has worked in the airline and travel industry for my entire career, I am more capable of dealing with this than most travel agents and simply do not wish to involve a third party. As a cynical friend of mine describes travel agencies :
“A business which makes you waste time going to see them or ‘phoning them and then you pay them good money so that they can screw up your booking and give you wrong advice”.
I know there are exceptions such as at least one of our contributors here but most agencies are a waste of space.

[rferguson]

I’ve not watched the video so apologies if a lot of this has already been included in that. But here is a few excerpts from an email from him ‘forging a stronger BA’.

Competitive forces –
Low cost short haul, low cost long haul, the big ME3 as well as US3.

Where BA is at:
– most punctual of the three big short haul carriers flying from London (does not say who the other two are nor what airports ‘london’ covers).
– baggage performance over past year the best in a decade.
– acknowledged BOB was not rolled out as smoothly as it could have.

Looking ahead:
– next year will be biggest route network ever.
– on some aircraft (type not specified) increasing the size of the World Traveller Plus cabin due to demand.

£4.5B investment over next five years including:
– 72 new aircraft including four new types (A350/787-10/A320/321 NEO)
– refurbish the cabins of 128 existing aircraft so they ‘feel like new’. Including the ‘mid J 747’ which was previously not going to be refurbished.
– install at seat power at all seats in all cabins
– WIFI on all aircraft in all cabins
– upgrading economy catering on long haul reintroducing the full second meal (from JAN ’18).
– new CW seat with direct aisle access from 2019.

[FDOS_UK]

BA’s problem is deliberate self inflicted injury.

Short term cost cutting may generate profits, but getting into this position is dangerous

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2017-11-07/graph%201-01.png

Jam tomorrow is not going to fix this – it will result in pricing elasticity to fill seats and a further decline in RASK etc.

Getting yourself into the middle ground of an industry sector is risky.

[Author]

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