Originally Posted by
GumshoeW12
Back on topic, TLV clearly has/had a loyal and passionate group of regular BA travellers who’ve been very vocal in defending its justification for a widebody. But while BA has many faults, it does know its business and it clearly believes those regulars aren’t numerous enough to sustain a widebody to a destination where tourism has nosedived.
To be quite honest, and blunt: no, I don't think they do understand their business as well as they should. And they most certainly do NOT understand the demographics of the TLV route. They seem to be completely oblivious of the fact that most of the "heavy regulars" on the route do NOT have Israeli BAEC addresses. So when they look at the route statistics, they are looking at the Israeli resident GGLs. Major mistake here. So they offered Israeli resident GGLs a free extension of their membership for a year, because of the war cancellations, but would not agree to do the same for non-Israeli resident members, even though they could see from their flying patterns that they always booked ex-TLV, and that over 90% of their flights were TLV-LHR-TLV. There are also scheduling issues which they could have taken into account but never did (giving UK half term (meaning cutting half of the daily TLV flights so as to use elsewhere) priority over pre and post Jewish festivals where demand is absolutely crazy). If they really did understand the route properly it would have been far more profitable for them. As with many other large organisations, they suffer from being rather dinosaur like, and very rigid.