Originally Posted by
NickB
The £11.99 was to MRS. Feel free to dedicate a post in full multicolour and bold capital letters when you see a £19.34 BA fare to MRS. These are fares, incidentally, which are not isolated but pretty common to dozens and dozens of destinations in FR price campaigns. Can you remind us exactly how many destinations BA offers at £19.34 or less?
As to "non-fare sales", as you put it, well standard FR fares on some domestic routes can also be as low as £9.99. While the case for Ryanair can be overstated (and this comparison between a souped-up FR experience and BA CE is an example of that) , it seems to me that you fall in the opposite trap of understating the extent to which FR prices are routinely not just a little but markedly cheaper than BA fares even though there will always be some counter-examples.
BA do plenty of flights well under £30 each way. Bordeaux, Malaga, Luxembourg, Barcelona, etc.
This, coupled with status benefits, makes them more attractive than FR on
most occasions for me. That said, I'm about to book FR for a family trip to Majorca in July as BA want 60k Avios and £130 and FR will sell me a return ticket from BHX (closer to me) with bags and seats for under £300 for the 4 of us.
Anyway, the point here was that FR can't realistically be compared to BA CE, and regardless of my opinions on CE (which aren't high), it's certainly a better product than FR.