Originally Posted by orbitmic

Gosh I really hope not. Ultimately, IMHO, if this is the way BA goes, it will pay the price in terms of lucrative connecting traffic just the way LX did when they decided to switch to BOB. It was an unmitigated disaster and the airline had to reverse its decision. I see three reasons why I believe it would be a mistake:

(1) competition for long haul. Much of the benefits made by BA are due to long haul passengers including connecting ones, in all classes. There, BA is competing with the likes of AF, LH, KL, etc. LH has improved its food offerings on mainline flights in recent years (admittedly, they chose to effectively abandon flights outside of their FRA and MUC hubs and leave those to semi-low-cost Germanwings), and AF and KL are also maintaining a food and drinks service on short and medium haul flights (and AF has restored a full bar after switching to soft drinks/beer/wine for a while. Incidentally, it has also improved Y food offerings on long haul with now two hot meals on most flights). So personally, I think that the BOB model is only the main point of comparison with low cost airlines but not really with other European majors and that the impact in terms of risking to lose badly needed long haul connecting traffic (including in Y and W) would probably largely negate the benefits of saving a relatively low expense of food and drink for BA.

(2) To cut a long story short, I think that Easyjet is better at doing Easyjet than BA would be. There are a number of structural costs that airlines like BA, AF, and LH have to bear, which airlines like U2, FR, and DY simply don't. It means that if such a 'major' airline tries to offer the same service as a low cost competitor, it effectively does it with a higher cost basis and thus can't fully compete on price. Indeed, while BA has become far more competitive on price notably from LGW in recent years, it is still a bit more expensive than U2 and it means that it needs people to "want" to pay a bit more to get something that they would not get from a low cost airline. If BA negates this quality advantage by trying to emulate worse competitors, people won't see a reason to pay more to fly BA (which they do) and will instead go for the lowest price for a comparable service, ie the competitor

(3) To me, one of the worst mistakes made by major airlines in particular in the current climate is to still believe in an overly compartimentalised passenger base - like the business people who always fly J or F on the one hand and the leisure travellers who always fly Y or W, which would mean that you could cut down some of the benefits of the Y and W travellers without any effect on your premium traffic. I simply do not believe that this analysis is commercially accurate. Increasingly some business travellers who do indeed travel in J or even F on long haul flights also frequently travel in Y particularly on short and medium haul. If you lose their "love" in short and medium haul Y, you thus take the risk of them also punishing you with their expensive long haul J travel, especially if competition is getting more structured (think the VS-DL JV, and AF, KL, LH, IB, AZ all having gone fully flat, including AF installing essentially the same new J as the new AA J and a very significantly improved F). Personally, I would say that things should never be taken for granted in the aviation industry, and that while BA has done a great job at mobilising a very strong custom base in recent years, a few unpopular decisions could cost serious losses of passengers who would then become very hard to regain.