Originally Posted by
FrancisA
Sorry, you have lost me completely with this.
BA standard Y fares still include both checked luggage and free seat selection.
BA also offer, since that marketing campaign, HBO fares which (by definition) never offered free luggage (why would you buy them if you want a luggage allowance?) and now no longer offer free seat selection. They do however offer a discount of £10-£15 per sector, which if you were doing the price comparison in the advert, you would need to take off the BA price quoted.
I am sorry, but I really think people are getting far too worked up over a change which should really have been part of the HBO product in the first place.
I also don't follow how sensible companies can implement HBO-only fares policies. I for one always have to travel with liquids and sharp objects which simply cannot be taken as hand luggage. How would such a ridiculous policy cope with that?
I'm the one not really following you here. What would be the logic of comparing the second lowest fare of one airline to the lowest fare of the others? Is the fact that they "name" it standard what justifies this?
Let's be clear. If BA ran the same campaign today, they would be found to be guilty of false advertising without question. If they wanted to avoid that they would need a very big disclaimer saying "this is only valid on our "standard" fares and not on our "Hand Baggage Only" fares regardless of reservation class or fare and regardless of frequent flyer status".
As for your second question, I'm not entirely sure I am following it either. If it were the KL version, you would get two free checked bags anyway (and one with AF even on HBO fares). If BA insisted on taking away the free additional bag of status customers on short and medium haul flights you would just pay for one bag on MMB which would cost you the same £10 as today.
I also think that you are missing the main points that most of us are making here:
1) This is not a "normal" enhancement made to save costs. This enhancement makes the value of Gold and Silver cards lower without saving any money whatsoever for BA;
2) This is not an isolated change. You can't pretend that those of us making a fuss about it are operating in a vacuum where no other worsening of Executive Club advantages have occurred in recent months. It is one thing to have a day of rain, you don't expect to say that you hate the weather just because of it. When it rains every day for a couple of weeks, you do, regardless of the rain is strong or weak on a particular day.
Finally I find your argument that BA are worsening HBO fares mostly for status passengers because there is - effectively - too much luggage congestion on board interesting but unconvincing.
First of all, if it were the case, it would be one of the most idiotic corporate strategies in living memory: a bit like your going to the doctor, him/her telling you that there is a problem with your hearing, and when you ask whether you will get an ear operation being told that no, they will operate your leg instead.
If BA wanted to react to too hand luggage over-filling, the obvious solutions would be 1) enforcing hand luggage checks at airports, 2) limiting the number of HBO fares sold on a give flight directly OR 3) limiting HBO to some specific fare classes which would implicitly mean that they would be capacity controlled or even 4) say that you will actually increase status benefits by introducing a free piece of checked luggage for status passengers on HBO fares.
All those things would directly tackle what you see as a problem much better than BA's further worsening of status benefits (as well as worsening of flying experience for non-status passengers) which effectively do not change anything to how many HBO passengers are likely to be in the flight or to the amount of luggage that goes into the overheads.