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| YouTube/British Airways |
Last Friday, at the end of a week in which British Airways cancelled, without warning or explanation, my flight back to London from Silicon Valley, the airline breezily launched "a love letter to Britain", a glossy TV commercial featuring, amongst other famous British faces, Gary Oldman, Olivia Colman, Anthony Joshua, Ellie Simmonds, Nicola Adams, Paloma Faith and a posthumous cameo from David Bowie, all presenting a cosy, patriotic picture of an airline that is, now, owned by an Anglo-Spanish company based in Madrid.
It’s all part of BA's centenary which, according to an e-mail that landed the same day, marked “a hugely exciting time for us". The e-mail went on to trill that BA "wouldn't be celebrating without you. You have made us who we are today, and we're immensely proud of how far we've flown together”, followed by the revelation that "since you first travelled with us in 2003 you have flown 201,191 miles, which is the same as flying 8.1 times around the world." This, however, is not strictly true: I’ve been flying with BA a lot longer than that, it’s just that I only signed up to its Executive Club loyalty scheme in 2003. Here in lies part of what makes the modern-day British Airways - a lot of marketing masking an absence of the substance that built the so-called British “flag carrier” and its reputation in the first place. It’s been a long time since BA could call itself "the world's favourite airline". Because, frankly, there are many others that are simply better.
I say this partly out of love and loyalty. I took my first BA flight in 1989, and it was quite a way to start - First Class to and from Moscow as part of a Sky TV documentary team. I began flying regularly with BA in the mid-90s when my PR job with Philips frequently took me to Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere in Europe. And then, when I moved to Amsterdam itself in 1999, BA became, for the following 17 years living abroad, something of a bus service. So you could say that over the last 30 years I’ve invested considerable loyalty in the brand, even if it doesn’t show anywhere near enough reciprocal love these days as once it might.
BA has become a 'cost down' carrier, managed by accounting fanatics desperate to shave every last percentage point of profit from its revenues, regardless of the reputational damage it does. As a relatively minor case in point, BA's short-haul flights have stopped offering free snacks in economy class and have moved to the easyJet/Ryanair model of selling sandwiches and drinks at vastly inflated prices. Even if they are from Marks & Spencer (a gimmick in Britishness, even if M&S probably source their sarnies from the same supplier as easyJet), a Honey Roast & Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Sandwich costs £3.90 in the air, whereas you'd pay £2.50 on the ground. Add £2.45 for a cup of tea and you’ve spent more than six quid on something other airlines give away for free. I’m sure most people could do without a snack for an hour or so, but what price a hot drink? Oh, and things get more interesting if you choose to conveniently use your Avios loyalty points instead of the cash you can’t easily get to in your cramped seat: on a two-hour evening flight back from Madrid the other week I bought that sandwich/tea combo, and dispensed with 900 Avios points for the privilege. To put this into perspective, I earned just 1000 Avios flying to and from Zurich with BA a few days later.
If BA's contemptuous attitude to economy passengers, manifested by a loyalty scheme that barely justifies the word loyalty, isn’t enough, then its planes - the very basis of its existence - are creaking. Not literally, thankfully, but the overwhelming feeling flying BA these days is that it’s not able to keep up with the modern fleets of many of its rivals, especially the Asian and Middle Eastern carriers. Remember my arbitrarily cancelled flight from San Jose? Well, it would have been made on a relatively new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one of the new class of fuel-efficient, carbon fibre-constructed jets that feature all sorts of innovations to improve passenger comfort and wellbeing.
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| Picture: Nick Morrish/British Airways |
My first experience of a BA Dreamliner wasn’t good - a flight to New Jersey in one of the most cramped economy class cabins I’ve ever experienced. Fair to say, my outbound journey to San Jose the other Sunday was more comfortable and in the larger and newer 787-9 Dreamliner model. Unfortunately, my journey back, rescheduled as a flight from San Francisco, an hour's drive away from San Jose on a Friday afternoon, was on an ageing Boeing 777, on which the crew couldn't switch off the cabin lights, less than ideal on a ten-hour overnight journey (ironically, the lights finally went off when the plane landed, as if all the system needed was a damn good whack). Its one nod to modernity was on-board WiFi, something in which BA has lagged behind many other major carriers for years (I first used it on an American Airlines flight ten years ago...). BA has promised to introduce wireless connectivity on 118 of its long-haul aircraft by this year, but based on my experience (i.e. just two of the ten long-haul flights I’ve made with the airline over the last 12 months), that rollout is taking a while. Getting WiFi into its planes should even be an opportunity for BA, given the premium it can charge for high-bandwidth streaming. The BYOD model could even replace traditional inflight entertainment, as passengers use their iPads and phones, often with better screens than seatback systems, to stream content from Netflix or catch-up players, or watch pre-downloaded programming.
A large part of BA's long-haul fleet is shockingly old, and staying that way. On another trip to Silicon Valley before Christmas I flew on a 20-year-old Boeing 747. Now, there's no doubting the romance of the “Queen of the skies", as aviation buffs call it. There is still a sense of grandeur to clambering aboard the original Jumbo Jet, with that massive, haughty-looking prow, its cockpit windows looking like the eyes of a slightly snooty headmistress, and its massive interior which, before ruthless airline economics took hold, used to feel luxuriously spacious. When it first flew in 1969, the 747 was a technological marvel: a giant ocean liner of the air that could seat well over 400 passengers comfortably in an age when 'jet set' not only evoked who was on board but also a degree of comfort to which even the most lowly economy passenger could enjoy. On top of that it was quick, too, averaging around 500 miles per hour in cruise. Today, though, it’s an anachronism - a four-engined gas-guzzler in an age of twin jet efficiency. BA still stands by the old lady, and although it has slowly started to drawdown its fleet of 747s, it will be at least another five years by the time they've all disappeared, some after more than 25 years' service.
Progressively BA has been refreshing its long-haul fleet, introducing 12 Airbus A380s and 30-odd Dreamliners over the last decade, with a promise of the first of an order of Airbus A350s to come by July this year. This fleet evolution is, however, tectonically slow. Even if the Dreamliner I flew to San Jose on was just three years old, it too lacked WiFi. To me that’s like buying a new car in 2019 without electric windows. Waiting to depart at Heathrow's Terminal 5 is an opportunity to see just how old BA's long-haul fleet is. If you’re lucky you might see one of its A380s (IAG chief executive Willie Walsh has recently said they’d consider buying more of these wonderful, comfortable super jumbos, but Airbus needs to slash its prices first). Emirates, the much admired Middle East carrier has built its fleet strategy around the A380, with more than 100 on its roster with some 142 planned to be in service when deliveries end. Other airlines, like Lufthansa and Qantas, have hedged on their A380 needs like BA. From a passenger point of view it’s a popular type - especially for its comfort, despite the huge size, but its cost always needs balancing, which is why some airlines have been negotiating with Airbus for the smaller A350. Either way, at least they’ve got relatively new fleets overall.
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| Picture: British Airways |
As BA retires its 747s it will still be left with more than 50 Boeing 777s, by then averaging a lifespan of 22 years. Today, many of these long-haul workhorses show their relative old age, with loose fittings (on my flight back from Dubai in October), or entertainment systems that don’t work and if they do are wedded to screens the size of first-generation TomTom satnavs. Amenities like in-flight entertainment are what relegates BA and the American carriers. The Asian and Middle Eastern airlines are, once again, streets ahead. Even Virgin Atlantic has long been ahead of its great rival BA in this department, offering seatback TVs when BA was still using communal bulkhead screens in its 747 cabins. Virgin’s Upper Class and Premium Economy seats are still on par with the Asian and Gulf airlines, and even in a standard economy seat on Virgin you don’t feel as commoditised as you do with BA.
This begs the question of why I stick with BA. To be honest, I don’t know. Lounge access can be bought or built up through loyalty to other, better airlines. But it’s somewhat shabby that BA should have benefited from my slavish loyalty (and for much longer than the 16 years I’ve been an Executive Club member) and yet the list of woes gets longer with every flight. I’m not alone, either, in feeling this way. In a recent survey for the consumer association Which?, BA came third from bottom, a long way behind carriers such as Singapore, Emirates and even Virgin. BA will point to the improvements it is making to cabin quality as a sign that it is taking the customer experience seriously. But frequent BA passengers beg to differ. Yes, the First and Club World cabins are plush, but step back into World Traveller Plus (premium economy) and World Traveller on long-haul flights, and the experience diminishes somewhat, especially on aircraft where ten economy class seats are now crammed across a row, with those rows appearing significantly tighter for legroom.
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| Picture: British Airways |
Here lies the most vexing aspect of British Airways. An airline seemingly stuck in a vortex of its own making. It still wants to be see as a premium 'flag carrier', and yet its business ethos is stuck somewhere between premium and budget. But BA - which is as margin-minded as any business of course - at least once operated with pricing that you felt was being matched by service quality. At best you'd say it was average today. Yes, its planes get you from A to B with a reasonable degree of punctuality (unless weather events force the airline to just shut down...). and unlike Ryanair or the American carriers, there is still a feeling that you are being somewhat looked after while on board. But there is an overall feeling of decay, of doing more for profit and shareholder dividends than for the paying customer (unless you're paying first or business class prices). Ageing planes and increasingly flimsy rewards for long-term loyalty don't help, either. More importantly, there are simply better airlines out there offering better value for money. No amount of slick marketing, or the claim of making its 100th year "very special" via an "ongoing £6.5bn investment programme to deliver new aircraft, cabins, service and destinations" make a dent in BA's diminishing reputation unless it makes these deliveries sooner, rather than later. The clock is ticking.
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