First it was food and drinks, now it is seat pitch. British Airways plans to reduce the seat pitch on its A320 and A321 aircraft from 30″ to 29″. That’s less room than Ryanair!
I’ll start with my conclusion: I think this is a horrible idea. The plan is to add 12 more seats (two more rows) by reducing seat pitch throughout the plane by 1″. This will be done on Airbus A320 and A321 aircraft serving shorthaul destinations within Europe.
I get that British Airways must compete with its low-cost rivals, but how low can you go? This retrofit will mean Ryanair can boast more legroom than British Airways. Yes, I can see the glib face of Michael O’Leary (Ryanair CEO) mocking British Airways for matching EasyJet in the seat pitch department. And he should…
What’s rich is the comment from BA–
From next year we’re making a small increase to the number of seats on our A320 and A321 fleet so we can keep fares low. Customers fly with us because we offer quality and value in all areas.’
So we can keep fares low?
I reference an article I wrote many months back entitled British Airways’ Curious Strategy for Growth. This policy of death by a thousand cuts is mind-numbingly stupid unless we are going to start seeing £19 fares on British Airways. We won’t.
But who knows…Profit was up last year at British Airways, despite a weak GBP. I still think it will backfire big time when fuel prices rise again.
CONCLUSION
British Airways proudly displays the “To Fly, To Serve” slogan on the side of each aircraft. If it is going to continue to chip away any semblance of service, it ought to do the right thing and scratch out the second part of the motto.
> Read More: British Airways’ Curious Strategy for Growth
> Read More: The Death of the English Breakfast on British Airways’ Domestic Flights
“Profit was up last year at British Airways, despite a weak GBP. I still think it will backfire big time when fuel prices rise again.”
A rising tide lifts all boats surely? All the carriers would just fiddle with their ‘carrier imposed surcharges’, pass the cost to consumers and continue their pre-2014 ways.
Maybe, but now we have Norwegian and WOW…not sure if it will be quite as easy this time.
I noticed on an Aer Lingus flight they had added extra rows (Dublin to Gatwick) and it made the journey most uncomfortable. As for Brace position in an emergency, no chance. BA now being run like the appalling Vueling. Time to change to another carrier.
Spot on, Matthew! I agree, what we’re seeing is nothing short of the slow destruction of a once proud, and until recently, formerly great airline. Clearly, the people running the airline now are nothing more than greedy, money grubbing tools of the financial community, who’s only objective is to do to BA, what Frank Lorenzo did to Eastern Airlines, and later, Continental, or what Carl Ichan did to TWA: strip out whatever money the could, and once done, walk away with their fattened bank accounts and leaving the carcass to die. Of course, it goes without saying, that the employees will be left with nothing to show for a lifetime’s worth of work, with underfunded pensions, and everything else that disappears when companies are run into the ground as BA clearly now is heading. The banks will get the proceeds from the virtually priceless slots, gates, aircraft, and route authorities, so they’ll be more than happy after having already cashed in from the stock buybacks and other short-term gains made possible by packing more and more people into ever smaller seats/rows on their planes, and the imposition of endless, and obnoxious, nuisance fees that this “Bloody Awful” management is pursuing. Let’s just start from the incident late last year when one of this repugnant management’s powerpoint slides at an investors’ day presentation said “Show Us The ‘effing’ Money!” If this alone doesn’t make clear what their objectives are, and the abject contempt this management has towards its brand and its fare paying passengers, nothing will. The examples of this brand destruction are so obvious, they, too, speak for themselves: the above noted greed grab laid bare at their investors’ day presentation; the loading of the incorrect navigation maps at a technical stop in Shannon, Ireland that forced the London-City to New York-JFK Airbus A-318 all premium class flight to be canceled for the trans-Atlantic segment last month, which forced the already high fare paying passengers to overnite in Shannon until the correct navigational maps could be loaded into the aircraft’s computers. This, of course, is how the high rollers are “experiencing” the destruction of BA. If this is what happens for the pricey seats on a flagship, exclusive service, intended for the former Concorde crowd, can you imagine how horrible it must be for the rest of us, the 85% or so of passengers who nevertheless still make the difference between profit and loss of any airline, and who executives at American and United Airlines admit contribute 50% of their airlines’ revenues? Yet, despite how important we 85% of fare passengers are to an airlines’ profitability, we’re constantly being devalued in words and deeds by those like this abysmal management team at BA, and derided as “cheapskates” who have no one to blame but ourselves for the contempt and arrogance now being shown by many airlines towards their fare paying customers…the same exact fare paying customers, without whom there would be NO AIRLINE to rape as this despicable management is doing. Need another example of the slow destruction now underway at BA? How about the widely reported service debacle at Athens last October that left passengers trapped for several hours on the plane, in darkness, without food and water being offered, with temperatures inside the aircraft reportedly 95-degrees Fahrenheit (35-degrees Celsius)? And now the seat pitch (“legroom”) in the main cabin is being reduced to a Vueling like 29-inches, which is even LESS than Ryanair? Folks, if this does NOT make clear how little you are valued by this now really, truly Bloody Awful airline’s management, nothing will. This is exactly what one would expect from “jackholes” who state “Show Us The ‘Effing’ Money” in a powerpoint slide. Greedy, arrogant, out-of-touch jerks, who care ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT PASSENGERS AND ONLY ABOUT THEMSELVES AND APPEASING THE BULLIES IN THE FINANCIAL COMMUNITY WHO HAVE LITERALLY PLACED ‘BOUNTIES’ ON THE HEADS OF AIRLINE CEOS WHO DARE TO STAND UP TO THEM. Need an example of that? Just ask Dave Barger, the former CEO of Jetblue, who was also on the original team working with David Neeleman to start that once great, passenger centric airline. When Barger balked at cheapening Jetblue’s product, at an airline that was already profitable and had an enviable, highly acclaimed, passenger friendly service, to appease the insatiable demands by the financial community, he lost his job in February, 2015 at the age of 56. This is what is happening at many airlines now. Managements are either shills or the financial community and its army of clever “consultants” constantly on the prowl for “new” and imaginative ways to strip bare products using techniques and methods dating back to the mid-1800’s for passenger railroads (and perhaps long before in other modes of passenger transportation) down to the worst possible conditions (see, for example, roofless, yes, roofless!, standing room only, third class rail cars/carriages) under the guise of “unbundling” to drive upsells as this contemptible (and misguided) BA management is. That’s what’s happening here in the extreme. Long discredited, shady, dishonest, inhumane, and ultimately outlawed bad business practices rising up from the mid-1800’s, yes, the mid-1800’s (can you believe we’re actually going back to crap like THAT?!?!), masquerading as “innovations”, “choices”, “options”, or “only paying for what one wants”. The misery of a 29-inch pitch seat on an airline like Vueling, and the awful service experienced, is perhaps, best illustrated by a family member who I booked a few months ago on BA’s web site for a Vueling operated “code-share” flight on a business trip because others he was traveling with were on the same flight who said immediately upon landing after 2.5 hours of being cooped in one of their teeny tiny seats: “DO NOT BOOK ME ON THIS ‘CRAPPY’ [he used a different word that usually goes by *@!?#£ in expletive terms instead] EVER AGAIN!!!” And he’s all of 5-feet 4-inches tall. Yes, that’s how bad Vueling is. If this is the model the new CEO of BA, who just so happens to be the former CEO of (yup, you guessed it!) Vueling, then it won’t be long until the destruction of BA is well on its way towards completion. And that would be a shame…a terrible shame. I say this not just as an “avgeek”, or a former travel agent who’s knowledge and flight experiences with BA dates back to the “Bad Old Days” before Lord Colin Marshall was brought in by Lord John King in 1983 to fix the then badly broken airline so it could be privatized four years later in 1987. The motto Lord Marshall used to implement his turnaround plan for BA itself speaks volumes in contrast to the nasty attitudes and full-on “bs” being offered by many current airline “management” teams, their “masters” in the financial community, and the legions of “consultants” that drink the Kool-Aid touting service product and seat “shrinkage” and devaluation as “innovative” passenger pleasing “options” that are nothing more than a new “spin” on despicable mid-1800’s sales practices then deemed acceptable which this “Vueling” gang piloting BA clearly does NOT believe in as part of BA’s brand history. The “Vueling” of BA as illustrated by the destruction of the BA brand and replacing it with Vueling’s truly awful brand stands in complete contrast with Lord Marshall’s, who’s philosophy was “Putting People First” to take a badly destroyed brand, and not just salvaging it, but completely turning it around into one of the world’s most awarded, highly regarded, premier PASSENGER PREFERRED airlines. Sure there were things Lord Marshall failed to adapt to towards the end of his distinguished career at BA, not to mention the infamous “Dirty Tricks” campaign in the early 1990’s waged against Sir Richard Branson’s airline, Virgin Atlantic. But the bottom line still is the early work and achievements of Lords King and Marshall at resurrecting BA from an airline in turmoil that easily could’ve floundered along in a slow motion death spiral like the one that appears to be the direction the present (greedy and incompetent) management at BA is clearly heading…I say this as someone who has written about this airline, and who’s professional experience at one time for an extended period, afforded me an opportunity to meet and work with many people who took great pride in the hard work they did to make BA the great airline it used to be. To this day, those years were among the most satisfying and among my proudest achievements for the contributions made to the consulting assignment I participated on. So there’s a personal dimension to all this, too, as like Matthew describes a “Death By A Thousand Cuts”, I find myself finally seeing in words something I have thought many times in the past six-months, the painful, slow destruction of British Airways being undertaken by a bunch of fools whose attitudes towards fare paying passengers can be summed up using their own words as laid bare in their powerpoint slide: “Show Us The ‘Effing’ Money”. Wow…so much for “Putting People First”… Surely, Lord Marshall, and Lady Thatcher, who viewed BA as a symbol reflecting either the worst or best image presented to the world, and who saw a reason to transform the airline from something nearly everyone agreed was “Bloody Awful” into something truly great, must be spinning in their graves if they can see the full-circle the present management is taking that may result in short-term cash lining their and their Masters’ pockets, but most assuredly, will destroy the airline with ever increasing speed. The question is NOT if, only when, BA is so “Bloody Awful” again from what is now being done to it, as the fraying edges exemplified by several recent well publicized missteps in service product delivery make clear is already underway, that the airline is in deep crisis requiring a complete change in management. Until then, passengers would be well advised to fasten their seatbelts and keep them fastened at all times, because the decisions being made by this greedy, short-term oriented only management, is only going to have the practical effect of making things much worse until the last of what can be stripped out of this once great company is done and over with, when someone will be brought in to clean up the mess these tools leave in their wake. And that’s going to be a VERY BUMPY ride between where we are now, where things are heading, and the hardship along the way until things get so bad, there’s only two options left: let the airline die, or bring in new management who really truly understand that this is as much a transportation business as it is a service business that must meet the needs to transport people at hundreds of miles per hours, several miles above the earth’s surface, for hundreds and thousands of miles in an enclosed tube for a few hours — and perhaps as long as 16 or 17 hours…PEOPLE…who pay their hard earned money for expenses that to many consume more than their paychecks, but are treated with utter contempt and branded “cheapskates” by jackholes, most of whom should be very thankful they’re blessed and fortunate enough to have “problems” like having to climb over a single leg rest to get to use the loo, and for whom that’s “too much of an inconvenience” to deal with who in the end are the only people advocating the relentless race to the bottom in airline “service” that most of us are having crammed down our throats. Like the Airbus A-318 and the handful of high-fare paying passengers who unexpectedly stranded overnight in Shannon, Ireland when the incorrect maps were loaded onto the computer, the current management is relying on “maps” that will ultimately have only one predictable outcome: the complete destruction of BA. How ironic is it that the hapless flight stranded in Shannon, bore the flight number of the BA in its glory days, “1” — the same flight number used for one its twice daily Concorde flights between London-Heathrow and New York-JFK…so sad, so very, very sad…
@Howard, slow your roll.
While you do make valid points about the direction the industry has gone, you fail to acknowledge the extent to which customer demand has brought us to this point. The industry is still driven by what PASSENGERS PREFER — I would just ask you to consider that in 2017 passengers want low prices more than the benefits you reminisce about.
The real cost of airline travel (inflation adjusted) has dropped a whopping 50% in the past 30 years, ushering in a never before seen era of world travel which has granted millions the ability to see the world who would otherwise never have been able to afford it. All the while, premium products have never been cheaper nor more luxurious. If you are willing to pay for it (even at prices cheaper than economy was in the 1960s!), the good old days can be yours.
My question to you – are you willing to essentially make travel impossible for hundreds of milllions of people around the world who would otherwise never be able to afford the trips that they take?
Worst airline ever. Still tempted to start a blog purely on BA shenanigans.
You should!