Originally Posted by
SCSA
Still trying to figure out the focus on "no lounge"....
I don't like it, but I can see seat selection being broken out from the bundle of services being offered in an ET fare. You book the ticket, pay for the ticket, print/collect the boarding pass, check your bag (or not for an HBO fare), get on the plane and have something to eat or drink.
The cost of lounge access for an ET passenger is unrelated to that. at least from the passenger's perspective and hard to quantify from BA's. I could go in the lounge and sit there quietly, or I could pound down a dozen glasses or wine and eat every crumb of food in the room.
Now BA could go the US model and only give lounge access to LH F/J pax, paid members and the highest elites. Domestic F/J pax are not even given access. But until they start doing this, I think an attempt to debundle the lounge really would be the straw that broke the camel's back.
You can argue, easily, that the seat selection for status holders is the same. It's not a cost to BA really - so why remove it? Answer - because they hope to gain more revenue by pushing to non-HBO fares.
So ... if you want to encourage it further ... what else can you remove? Lounge access looks like an easy one to me anyway. There's not much else to remove!
It wouldn't surprise me, given where we are now, for BA to make that move. That'd lower their costs and it would help all those people complaining about lounge overcrowding.
And if Raffles is right (from his blog this morning) - there'll be a paid alternative in T5 soon enough anyway.
M.