Originally Posted by
frandrake
In all honesty, while I do often criticise BA, I find any comparison with low cost to be preposterous.
Walsh’s success over 15 years in his last 3 jobs was precisely because of his ability to take substantial cost out of each of the businesses he ran, whilst increasing revenue. I’d even go further to say his key differentiator was that he cottoned on much quicker than almost every other legacy airline that low cost was the
only way. It’s inevitable that his successor will continue to follow this path and follow as close to Ryanair and the other low cost leaders as they can get away with without impacting revenue.
This actually struck me earlier in the week, queuing up to board a Ryanair plane 20 mins before boarding started, as I had done exactly the same on a BA flight the previous week.
The point is not that there is no difference between the two models, rather that that list of differentiators between low cost and BA gets smaller year on year.