smashmouth

To refresh your memory, GB are our "friends" with the flight number range BA6800-6999, who are "based at London Gatwick operating flights to the southern Mediterranean, including Cyprus, France, Gibraltar, Portugal, Spain, Canary Islands, Malta and Northern Africa."

Without doubt, they augment the British Airways shorthaul network considerably, feeding an otherwise route-mal-nourished Gatwick and even braving the big, bad north with services out of Manchester - a city BA Mainline only deems worthy of connecting feeder flights to LGW or LHR.

On paper the franchise agreement must have seemed a dream relationship in the making, but have we reached the point where it would be better for BA to say "look - I know you're upset - it's not you, it's me"?

Whilst GB have the route network, British Airways is a (mostly) reliable, repected, scheduled airline... should it maintain an alliance with a franchise partner whose comprehension of "sheduled" is at least three schedule changes to your summer holiday flight, followed by a route withdrawal?

My fear is that while GB operate as BA they are seriously damaging the BA brand - particularly on holiday/chav routes that we're competing with the youngsters such as EZ on...

FYI, a brief snippet of the last few months in the life of GB AIRWAYS:

Feb 28th – commercial policy FEZ route withdrawal – summer 2006 schedule
Feb 10th – commercial policy VLC route withdrawal – summer 2006 schedule
Feb 3rd – 46 schedule changes to summer 2006 schedule
Jan 24th – 42 schedule changes to summer 2006 schedule
Jan 17th – 24 schedule changes to summer 2006 schedule
Dec 22nd – 158 schedule changes to summer 2006 schedule

And it all started around Dec 15th with well over 200 schedule changes to, you guessed it – the summer 2006 schedule


For fairness (read: biased comparison and point-making), in the same period:

BA Mainline:

Dec 15th – commercial policy LHR-MEL route withdrawal – effective March 27th

BA CitiExpress/Connect:

27th Jan – commercial policy MAN-OSL route withdrawal – effective March 6th

BA Loganair:

none

BA Sunair:

Jan 9th – commercial policy AAR-BRU route withdrawal – effective 16th Jan

BA Comair:

none