richie_ja

...and another data point here. I have two clients from Rio de Janeiro (the same company) that travel frequently to the far east via Europe. One swears by BA due to the flat beds, eats in the lounge, goes to sleep on the plane. The other is loyal to AF and he cites the better food being one of the reasons. Admittedly, I've heard mixed reviews about AF food, but regardless, the food issue is affecting his travel choice.

At the margin, perhaps to a smallish degree, or perhaps with a long lead in terms of customer choice of airlines, these soft service quality things DO have an impact on revenues...they must do. And in the long term they indirectly hit the brand value and the imact of that is not measurable.

NickB

True but isn't it for customers at the margin that you compete? Short of dramatic events or a major competitor pulling out of the route, nothing that you do within the normal range of things is going to increase you market share by 30% overnight (or decrease it by 30% for that matter). It is on those 1% of customers that you play.

Sixth Freedom

This is only true in the short term. Over the long term both yield and market share can benefit from significant strength in all areas of the onboard product, including catering. Hence the profitability of SQ.

Allocating revenue and costs is always a bit ambiguous and ultimately I guess that an airline's decision on these kind of things comes down to whether or not they have a capable analyst who believes the statement above or not.

Sixth Freedom

You only compete at the margins in the short term. And remember that the markets you really want to get high share of (in Club and it's competitors) are the high spending passengers.

henkybaby

But SQ has a very inconsistent hard product in J and is not always the 'flying Michelin star restaurant' that some want you to believe... I think SQ's profitability has other reasons.

I agree that the F&B in BA J is laughable at best but I will keep flying them until other airlines offer the same consistent hard product across the board and the same network. Food is last on my list.

Land-of-Miles

So how many of those complaining about poor J food regularly fly the NYC route? Of those how many are putting their money where their mouth is and taking the CWLCY service? I just flew out to JFK this evening ex LCY as my first mainline BA J flight in the last year and could fault absolutely nothing in the F&B offering, from starter to cheese and biscuits it was superb and at least as good as J in the "good old days" and much better than most of my flights in BA F in the last 3 years and better than my previous experiences of CWLCY.

Of course CWLCY costs rather more than ex LHR or LGW, so how many are actually using the service? I know today was a low traffic day but we had 8 other PAX on our flight.

stueys

Haven't tried LCY service yet, wish I'd thought to do it when I went to JFK a few weeks back. Glad it's still at pre-enhanced level.

I'm reasonably well rounded on the rest of the product to have formed a view - as an indication in the last 6 months I've flown around 1700-1800 tier points and been in NF, CW, CE, ET and UK Domestic.

LeisureFirst

An alternative, which can be both cheaper and more convenient than CWLCY is to take the view that "F is the new J" and MFU at least on the outbound daytime sector (which is presumably what you have in mind anyway). Z-availability on that route has been quite good this year (although U-availability much worse than it used to be).

LTN Phobia

Easy to do ex-LHR because there are lots of places from where to buy food. Not so easy at the likes of CDG for instance, when the home is nowhere near CDG and the facilities are nearly non-existent.

LTN Phobia

The reputation for Singapore Girls and service aspects?

I must admit I consider hard products (esp bed) to be much more important than food. But the food is easier thing to fix for an airline than hard product, and besides moaning is more interesting than being quietly satisfied

squeeler

The main meal offering in CW (LHR to BOS) yesterday was quite the most repulsive thing I have been offered to eat in a long time. Small beef pie (ok), but a piece of meat (brained beef, allegedly) that could have been road kill and cabbage (one of my faves) that was so repulsive that it contaminated the whole plate. On the "emergency curry scale" this was really well towards the lowest of the low end.

J-Class

Thanks to MAD madness over the weekend causing the cancellation of my Lan Chile flight, I've just returned from Santiago on Air France in J - my first long-haul trip on AF for a couple of years. The food product quality and presentation is quite simply leagues ahead of BA, so for people who can sleep comfortably in the seat, I can easily understand why they would be loyal to Air France. And I've met several people who prefer AF over LA or IB (both carriers with proper horizontal flat beds, if not quite the BA product) on the Santiago-London route.

For me, however, the angled AF seat remains an abomination and I have rarely been so tired getting off an aircraft as I was on arrival!

But I would have thought - although perhaps not on this specific route - that BA could increase loads and thereby profits with a stronger catering offering.

Land-of-Miles

I am sure BA have thought of this too, but the cost doesn't only accrue for the marginal passengers you pick up as a result of improving food quality it accrues to every J passenger. So if load factors in J are running consistently high there is an argument that the marginal benefit of improvements will attract only the odd one or 2 extra passengers but the marginal costs will permanently force up costs across J. If the J product is strengthened markedly then the difference between F (which in most of my experiences in the last 2 to 3 years has been fairly dire with its own share of inedible food), is eroded. You have to apply the argument equally across all premium cabins. Now assuming you have 100 meals for J (to include options etc.) at £10 extra a meal in that is £1000 per sector, add in £20 a meal by say 25 in F and that is £1500 a sector. That cost is built permanently into operating costs for every flight after the change is made.

If you do the maths this can be the difference between BA making a profit or making a loss. The premium cabins would have to be virtually deserted and a catering improvement would need to produce more than £1500 a sector in additional revenue consistently for BA just to break even. Since some flights will be full already this is a fairly tall order.

Doing the maths a little further it would take a total of 50k return sectors at £1500 extra sector catering cost (with no corresponding increase in income) to wipe out £150M a year in annual profit.

There is no way BA will commit to eroding that level of profitability without rock solid indicators that catering quality really is costing the sufficient business that they should be worried. As I understand it load factors continue to climb excluding the impacts of exogenous factors such as volcanoes, weather disruption etc.

From what you say J-Class you would still choose a flatbed seat over better catering, so you aren't much of a revenue loss risk are you?

Lobengula

I too value a flatbed over catering. However, more and more airlines will offer J-Class flatbeds so this cheapo meal service can't continue much longer.

But yes, the: "Never give more quality than you have to" is a sound business concept.

globalste

You think that's bad? Myself and Mrsglobalste were on a SAS flight to SEA via CPH from LHR, the flight was an hour delayed so by the time we got onboard and away it was 11:20. We were looking forward to a decent breakfast as the lounge is fairly pss poor at that time in the morning, know what we got? Beef Stew!!

Wrote and complained and was told we had beef stew because breakfast had passed - who on earth serves beef stew for a 10:15am flight?!?!