Just experienced BA BoB for the first time on LHR-PRG yesterday. Overall, it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. However clearly they need to speed up the transaction times. LHR-PRG is just a shade under 2 hours, and the trolley barely got to the back of the A320 before the aircraft started descending. The flight was also only about 70% full. Lots of purchases being made. In my case, I will be expensing anyway.

So, it looks like customers have adjusted fairly quickly. My only suggestions would be:

-Recognize BA gold status in some way in ET. I'm an AA EXP (Emerald), shifted away from BA due to the limited ways to earn status by flying economy (which is mandatory for the company I work with). However BA really could learn from AA and offer a free drink and snack to their Gold (and above) members.

-Find a way of dealing with orders more quickly than a single trolley. I understand this is hard with at least one or two Cabin Crew tied up in Club, and one in the galley. But still - there could be better ways of handling it. Perhaps go with the AirAsia model and serve pre-orders first (if they ever do go with pre-ordering). At least ex-LHR and LGW there's no reason why pre-orders can't work. Outstations might be a bit more tricky.

Recieved an email yesterday from Edi airport about all the fantastic food that is now packaged for taking onboard! Having spent plenty time flying Domestically in the US..and seeing folk walking onboard with whole pizzas and Burger & fries..I really hope it never comes to this. If BA doesn't get a grip of this quickly..people may just end up buying their own food...

Not sure if this is BoB related or not but AMS-LHR is delayed an hour because of the fog and the gate staff are giving everyone free bottles of water and chocolate bars. Never had this at the gate before!

It baffles me why they didn't before, it's not as if they've been stepping off a BA SH with a full belly in recent years. Ok, so probably the low quality of post security food outlets in the uk is more the reason for that. Can you get pizza airside in a box? In the uk it's often so long before you actually get onboard, that you are quite likely to scoff whatever pre bought hot food you've got...

Contactless card payment is coming "very soon", and should help speed up the process.

Well LHR have been advertising their 'picnics' for a few years now, they've just decided to step up the promotion due to the recent BA enhancements. I believe the first place to offer a picnic was Plane Food (maybe even from opening), but a few years ago they encouraged other operators to do the same.

As for pizza I always remembered the lounge lift in MAN (back when I was working there around 2012-13) smelling of pizza as there was a pizza shop near to the lift. I'm sure they'd offer it boxed if requested.

There's a Burger King in NCL which has a unique smell that I remember from some flights in the US and some UK rail journeys. I've never noticed it on UK flights even with buy on board, but it could happen, I just hope it doesn't.

Only helps if you have it though. In my wallet I have exactly 1 card (out of 7) that offers this - and it is a debit card from a bank account I rarely use or have money in...

They shouldn't have launched without contactless support. OK not everyone has contactless cards, but it's widespread enough to speed up some of the transactions. They also need to make the payment process by default easier on their tablets.

Has anyone successfully used a Monzo card yet? Technically it's pre-pay but it still works in places where online authorisation isn't used. I've used it on the old BA duty free machines, Aer Lingus, easyJet and the old swipe and sign machines on Great Western (I think they've finally phased these out).

It'll still help you as it means people before you in the aircraft will get processed faster!

They could be like AA, etc. and just swipe the card for everyone else.

Am yet to experience it...

I am wishing my ex-colleagues all the best with this management balls up though... Never ceases to amaze me how poorly BA manage to implement things.

Until recently swiping was the norm in the US and many places did not request (or if it was requested it wasn't checked) signature for small transactions. When we used swipe and sign in the UK I can't recall ever been asked to not sign when there's been a cashier present, the only times I can remember not signing is when dealing with machines.

I was told one of the reasons they entered your passport details for credit card duty free transactions on board was because the system was not chip & PIN and they needed to ensure that the card belonged to the person that was paying.

As chip & PIN is widespread throughout Europe BA would be taking a big risk not using this method of verification. Of course, with contactless there's no way to verify that you've not just taken someone elses card but the main difference here is that a magstipe is simple to clone, the banks accept liability for contactless cards as long as the user reports them stolen, if BA accepts payment via magstripe and the card has been reported stolen then BA will have to accept the loss.

At the moment it seems that BA is pushing a large number of transactions through as paper voucher transactions, which is surely just a "big"* a risk and probably exposes them to higher interchange fees.

* By big, I mean probably less than £5 a week is going to be disputed.

Didn't the optimists in BA think they'd never need to use these paper vouchers and therefore not bother training the staff with them.

For those without contactless cards, many phones now offer contactless payments. I use mine all the time - it's much easier than rummaging for a card as my phone is always to hand.

Does require NFC to be switched on though - not sure if that's permitted in flight is it?

We're unsure whether Apple/Android Pay will work on BA as contactless transactions on mobile usually require authentication which is why the transaction on most systems is not processed instantly.