I’m not going to decide never to fly BA based on this particular experience, that’d be ridiculous. But on the aggregate of experiences I’m more likely to start with Google Flights than the BA site when looking for options, and that’s a problem for BA if replicated across a wide segment. Because they are not generally competitively priced and the drip drip effect of internally focused cost initiatives is to remove what is left of secret sauce they once had, so price and convenience becomes key.

In my previous life in strategic product and brand marketing, I often pointed out that exceeding expectations for user experience isn’t a big ask these days as customers expect poor service; that everything is going to be a struggle against long hold times, excessive process, unempowered agents, and now AI I guess. Low expectations are easy to exceed.

BA are more likely to improve NPS and thereby margins by prioritising customer experience over efficiency and partition of internal services.

But it’s way harder to estimate the balance sheet impact on intangibles, and so it tends to be the nickel and diming on cost that gets waved through. And the product marketeers will be bogged down in the zero based budgeting nonsense and probably demoralised at having to business plan every single detail. To me it’s classically penny wise pound foolish.