Hi,

I have noticed the following issues, based on some reading of your "tiny" minds...

1. the baby website states that it is "THE" airline with tiny fares. This is not correct. baby and BMI are separate airlines with separate aircraft operating certificates, at least as far as I can tell. It is a contravention of advertising standards to sell yourself as one airline but actually be another. BMi hold the slots at LHR, not tiny. If you book tiny off LHR, you get BMi mainline and not baby. This does come up on the website eventually, but the opening page of baby is wrong.

As a pointer to show that BM are not the only ones to break this rule, BA out of LGW are just as bad as the flight are operated by BA, the express AOC holder and GB.

2. if you buy a tiny fare then the terms and conditions of use that apply at the time of sale apply to your travel. There is a thread comment on current ts and cs. If you are silver then you get access for anything that you buy before they change the Ts and Cs.

It is interesting that BM has decided to cross sell within BMi and baby. This imposes a lot of internal audit requirements on them that they might not have considered in order to meet their AOC requirements. You might regard it as petty, given that BMA own both airlines, but the paperwork still has to be done.

Would anybody like me to draft the letters to the CAA. Economic regulation for point 1 and safety regulation for point 3.

I was just about to rejoin the DC programme. I used to do 60 C class a year but then moved to LGW and just run a few other cards now. My spend a year can be over �100,000 on airfares. Will this help me spend on Star, no.

bmibaby do not sell seats on BD. If you try to book a bd route on bmibaby.com, you get a message that you will be redirected to the bmi website, and if you read the T&Cs, you will see that you are contracting with British Midlands Airways Ltd, and not with bmibaby limited.

Agreed, but this makes it all the worse that Airline A is advertising seats on Airline B as its own. I agree the contract is done correctly but the way it is advertised is not.

BMIbaby do not operate from LHR and this needs to be made an awful lot clearer in the marketing materials. They are confusing the hell out of a key group of customers and will lose business as a result. They may also pick up lower fare business with this strategy, but if you ask me it makes no sense to alienate higher fare paying passengers in the battle to attract low spending passengers.

They DO state that flights are operated by bmi before redirecting you to the bmi site.

This being said, from a marketing perspective, you could not try to confuse brands more if you tried.

The baby website has the logo in the top left hand corner stating THE AIRLINE WITH BABY FARES. "the" implies that it is exclusive. It is not exclusive. There are two airlines that have TINY fares. bmibaby and bmi.

bmibaby opening page and then click on the LHR offers. The main offer page comes up.

now the offer page contains "bmibaby tiny fares from London Heathrow available from 1st August 2005 onwards" with the expectation that THE only airline is then operating it.

not bmi tiny fares but bmibaby tiny fares. Again, raising in the operator expectation to be baby not mainline AOC. The rest of the links are down at the moment. Nowhere up to this point is the possibility of the flights being operated by BMI mainline mentioned.

Yes, but since you cannot buy without being told that it is operated by bmi and you can't even buy the fare from bmibaby.com site since you are redirected to the BD site, in what way are you being misled?

Is it that different from being told on the last page that your (codeshare) flight is operated by another carrier?

not sure I can help you with your specifics but the T&Cs on the BMI website are very misleading.

At least when I booked last week, when you click on the fare rule links (eg wowbmi or tinyn) the Ts and Cs are completely differnet to those you see when you click on the links on your e-mail confirmation.

You then cancel your fare and don't automatically get a full refund even though you cancelled in less than 24hrs (although the kind lady at refunds is now sorting that for me)

Finally, I'm getting really pi$$ed off with the likes of BMI and Ryanair (and all the others for that matter) advertising fares without including costs (in order of importance) such as, fuel surcharge, mandatory card fees, mandatory offline fees, mandatory 'booking' fees per sector, tax, charges etc etc.

It's about time the ASA (or the government) got off their backsides and mandated you can only advertise in big letters the full cost of the journey (including usual extras such as credit card surcharges, offline booking fees)

Yes, allow discounts if booked online (within certain limits to stop Ryanair offering 60% discounts to get around it) and maybe others such as credit card discounts (max %age?) but they should only be allowed to LEAD with the USUAL lowest price most of their customers will actually HAVE to pay.

rant over

I am not too worried about anything, merely trying to stimulate debate.

1. baby will have to change its header as it is not the only airline with tiny fares, BMi has them too.
2. the advertising of the airfare should really be the fully inclusive price. Hello, I would like to go from London to Glasgow. I would like to fly but not pay for the airport. I would suggest that it is difficult to go without using an airport or heliport! The insurance surcharge is a joke. Do they split out the cost of the insurance on the ticket. No, so why put a difference in there. It is actually just another cost item for the airline.

The fuel surcharge is a similar joke. I have not booked bmi recently. Do they do the Ryanair trick of charging extra for anything other than a very unpopular card which few have? (BMI card excluded). Is the credit card charge actually reasonable for the cost that the retailer is incurring.

If, for example, the fare and taxes and and and were �100, then the credit card charge of 4.85 would represent 4.85% addition. what do airlines end up getting charged by the credit card companies? Any idea anybody. This could be interesting as a cross subsidy issue. If the airline is charged an average of �3 but passes on a �4.85 to the punters, there is a hidden airfare subsidy of �1.85 per pax. Very naughty.

Must have a word with Sir Michael when his Baron pulls up next to my aircraft at Shoreham one day soon!

The rate that bmi pay for the transaction will obviously have been negotiated with their merchant serives provider, however, a company the size of bmi with their CC turnover, there isnt a chance that it is anywhere near 4.85%! I am a business manager for a UK high street bank, and we don't even charge our new start, few small transactions a week, customers that!

Quite agree, I'm sure there would be uproar about 'Rip-Off Britain' if the supermarkets started taking out national adverts for cheap food, only to add surcharges at the tills to cover the rising cost of diesel and insurance

I'm no expert on this but there has been some discussion of it in the 'BA and Amex' thread in the BA forum. From memory I think 1.5% for Visa/Mastercard and 2.5% for Amex has been mentioned.

and anyway, if the fares are indeed as tiny as they would like us to believe, then �4.85 is going to be a whole lot more than 4.85%

I am not convinced by 1. This is just an advertising slogan. Should KLM be required to remove references to 'The reliable airline' on the ground that it cannot establish that it is the only reliable airline (ignoring the jump of faith required to actually believe that they are actually reliable )
OTOH, I could not agree more on 2. and the joke about surcharges of all kinds. But then, which carrier is not guilty of comparable tricks? Which full service carrier does not impose fuel surcharges and passes these off as 'taxes and fees' and which LCC does not impose a surcharge for cc usage? There might be one or two in each category, but they most definitely are the exceptions.