Smid

If anyone looks at the likes of Ryanair, Jet2, Flybe fares at short notice on basically full flight, they're up at that price anyway... Check Easter or Mayday weekends close to the date. I used to take extra days holidays near public holidays when i worked in Germany, just to get my return back to just 2 times the normal price (Flybe).

shefgab

BA got rid of return pricing in Y on most Europe routes a long time ago, so no difference that this was a o/w. And this wasn't last minute, it was a month out. The evening flight (that i'm on) was £88, and the next day flight (now only a few days away) is still only £73. I'm not debating the price of the flight, just my willingness to add profit to BA on an already very expensive (and in my view vastly overpriced) ticket.

When I buy something overpriced, I'm much more likely to then try and save some money than opening my wallet even more, although I understand that many people don't feel similarly.

South London Bon Viveur

My first actual BoB experience, LHR to LIN, having ignored it completely on my only other Y flight since its introduction.

I vowed never to spend a penny on BoB (that lasted long) but I convinced myself that it was in order to share my experiences with the FT community and as part of a wider market research, so I made an exception. I was in the first row behind the curtain, which for LIN typically goes back 8 or 9 rows.

Hot food orders taken first. I gather "hot food" means bacon sarnie because there doesn't seem to be anything else hot on the menu (food wise). Didn't see any takers, but then wasn't really looking. When it came to drinks I ordered a coffee and some water. I mentioned to the CC that it was my first BoB transaction and he congratulated me. Paid contactless with AMEX which seemed to go ok but the IPAD thing did seem slow. 10 minutes later he appeared to have got no further than the row behind.

Coffee took me a while to figure out, but when I did, it tasted very nice.

I think BoB can be a success if they focus on food and premium drinks but still offer a basic water/tea service for free. That would be so much better.

BDAgirl

Flew my first BOB Flight LGW-GVA on Thursday. Had a quick chat with 2 of the crew, just after boarding. For one of them, it was his first BOB flight, he seemed quite nervous! His colleague felt that it was going ok so far but that BA simply arent't loading enough sandwiches on each flight as they are proving very popular.

It was a short 1hr 10 minute flight and they made it through to the last row. I was in 19F and I estimated they made it to my row around 25-30 minutes after take off.

I don't BOB when I fly FR or U2, so neither will I when I'm on BA. I bought my own water bottle and filled it up in the lounge prior to boarding.

subject2load

Wise move ^

The most I ever do BoB-wise when travelling on other LCC's is buy a coffee - and that's probably what I will do with BA. Although ...... based on (some) reports as to the taste & temperature of their BoB coffee, I'm now not so sure about spending even £2.30

Given just how long it can take the BA trolley to reach your particular row (assuming it makes it there at all .... and then has anything of interest left to buy) it seems to me that the real benefit of bringing on board is not just a matter of cost-saving, but that you get to eat & drink as soon as you want.

Chris9642

First BOB experience back from NCE this week - having flown out in Club to avoid the potential drama I wanted to test out the experience on the return - sat in Row 23 on an A319 (Club was rows 1-8). From take off to crew reaching my seat almost in the back row was an hour - not ideal but certainly not as bad as I was expecting - almost every row purchased something and there was a lot of back and forth to galley to retrieve items. I purchased 2 G&Ts (and then went back for a third) 😳😳. Much prefer being able to buy Bombay with Fever Tree tonic than drinking Gordon's with Swhepps as before BOB. Payment was extremely quick and seamless with a contactless AMEX and the crew seemed relieved I didn't require a receipt. My only issue was waiting an hour - had I sat myself in the front section of Y then service times wouldn't have been an issue at all. I don't really understand the feedback about the differences it makes in crew interaction - my interactions with the crew were exactly the same as before when they used to serve free food and drink - a polite offer of drinks , a smile and moved on - same as always. Crew seemed happy enough and service on way out and back was very polite . I still do much prefer the experience in CE with a more personalised service - on the flight out I had an Excellent Cod dish washed down with 4 champagnes and an extremely friendly CSD looking after us - the extra space (seat) , the service and food on evening flights still make CE worthwhile for me every time. Although I do have another BOB experience coming up from BCN in a few weeks - I will report back then .....

C

subject2load

One hour does seem an inordinate amount of time to have to wait for a drink

I generally use Monarch (A319) when popping down to the Balearics (although did go BA last sumner on a RFS fare), and for the extra sum of around just £20 at time of booking, I can very often bag row 1. Good seats + oodles of extra leg room with their config.

That way I can get my coffee (or G+T in the case of other pax ...) with no delay.

Monarch also offer a good range of BoB (hot) meals - including full English brekkie - but I happily bring my own snack food for such short sectors.

BA6948

There is no interaction with the cabin crew if you decide not to buy anything. There is no interaction with the cabin crew if they don't reach your row as what happened to him last week on a LHR-CDG.

By the way talking about inflight experienc. hHve flown on the CDG-TUN AT 06:55 yesterday morning. Flight time equivalent to a LGW-ALG on BA. The atmosphere on board was great. The flight was 50% full. So I got to stretch and sleep as my row was empty as did other passengers. Flight attendants came to ask us to put the safety belt on as they didn't wish to disturb us in case of turbulence. They also asked us whether they we wanted them to wake us up for the breakfast service. That was nice. I said yes. As the flight was not full and people were all snoozing, they decided to come with the breakfast service around 1h before landing. They woke me up. I got a yogurt, fruit put and a hot wrap (eggs and cheese) plus water and a delicious hot chocolate.

I felt really relaxed and loved the fact that I didn't worry about being served or not and whether I could get what I wanted or not. It is also a relief not to have additional receipts when you travel on business. What we hate the most is claim expenses with dozens of receipts that sometimes get lost.

And let's not forget that Air France has a great app called Air France press where you can download digital issues of a great quantity of newspapers and magazines, they even let you download movies to watch onboard or whenever you want basically. They also didn't remove newspapers and still give a refreshing towel and have smart cabins with nice headrests Andy you can request a blanket and a pillow if needed.

I felt great after that flight and relaxed. I enjoyed every bit of it. And most importantly, I felt Air France was not trying to squeeze me for extra £££ which is what you feel with BA in all cabins since Alex Cruz joined.

If people are put off by the BoB, it is actually because an accumulation of cost cutting measures that lead you to think:enough is enough. Spinning it as customer has asked us on all of that BS makes it even worse. They have too jumped on the bandwagon of alternative facts.

Flexible preferences

More and more positive experiences of BoB seem to be filtering back now, at least judging by the balance of reports on this thread.

subject2load

Perhaps.

Although, the report to which you added your comment seemed to be much more positive about CE than BoB service. As the poster concerned said, waiting an hour to get a drink was "not ideal" ..... with the positive angle (!!) being that "it was certainly not as bad as I was expecting". Praise indeed.

Personally I wouldn't be overjoyed by waiting an hour to get a drink either. But what is of more concern I guess is simply the fact that on those flights where demand is apparently high, it's often reported that not enough food is loaded ; and this, combined with the general slowness of the whole process results in many pax not even being given the opportunity to BoB should they want to.

After a good few weeks now, the so-called teething problems seem far from resolved in the case of many flights. I still feel BA could have got to grips with things much more quickly, with assistance/advice from the likes of other more experienced BoB short-haul LCC's.

Andriyko

You derive information from individual reports here. It is impossible to judge whether BoB is running smoothly or not without access to data that only BA has access to. No airline can reliably predict how many and which food items will be sold on a particular flight. I mostly fly BoB airlines and I see that they often run out of certain items, and they've been at it for many years now. I am sure that the easy response here will be to load 100% of everything, same as for F/CW catering, but that is never going to happen as wastage will be high. There will always be instances of insufficient catering on all airlines, but that does not mean that BoB is a failure. When catering was free certain items used to run out as well.

subject2load

Indeed I do derive information from 'individual reports' ; in much the same way that I regularly derive information about individual hotels from friends & contacts who actually stay at them (as well as myself).

And I'd like to confirm that yes, I'm all too aware of just how important internal 'data' is to a business of any size when it comes to decision-making.

But here's the single most important barometer for the whole question of whether a particular service offered by a customer-facing business is "running smoothly or not" . And guess what .....it's nothing to do with the sort of internal data that only the company (in this case, BA) has access to. It is, of course, all about what the customer experiences, and his/her level of satisfaction.

You won't find too many diners singing the praises of a restaurant that very often finds itself unable to provide the food stated on its menu - not to mention the ultimate worst case scenario of no food at all. Perhaps in such situations you yourself might be reassured & comforted by the restaurant owner telling you that, according to their (confidential) internal data, everything is "running smoothly"..... ? I take a rather different view.

elitetraveler

On BA's twitter 4 BOB complaints in the last 2 hours - including 2 where they only got through half the cabin and another where free water was refused.

There didn't seem to be any tweets either praising the food or having to pay. @:-)

Andriyko

But that's the issue - what is 'very often' and how do you establish that something happens very often? I have been flying BA for almost 20 years, and I, thankfully, have never experienced broken seats, failing entertainment systems, bad or rude service or many other failings, which is why I think that they are an exception rather than the norm. However, whenever someone posts about their bad experience it is often presented as the norm and to describe how awful BA always is (which is not the reality). If ten people report that there were problems with BoB (unavailability thereof), it does not make it often. If everything runs smoothly on 95% of flights then I'd consider it a success. Of course, some passengers on the 5% of the flights will be unhappy if they do not get to buy something for one reason or another but it won't make the whole BoB thing a failure and it won't necessarily mean that it will affect you on any of your flights. We need to be reasonable here. Things will not run perfectly 100% of the time unfortunately. I would not expect for something not to be available on my flight based on the reports here as they are a tiny minority of passengers' experience. If you come to a conclusion re BoB based on a few reports here, it is of course your right, but I would want to rely on a much bigger pool of passengers (that internal data that BA has) in order to establish how likely it is that an item will run out or whether or not there is a problem with BoB. As far as the customer experience is concerned, again, it depends how often you have to deal with a bad situation. I do over 20 sectors on PS a year, and in the last few years a BoB item was unavailable only three or four times. While I was disappointed on those particular occasions, it did not affect how I view the airline in general. It would have needed to be a much more frequent occurrence for me to have a problem with it or for my satisfaction to be affected.

HHarry

So 95% delivery is successful, but PS have only managed 80-85% with their BOB?