jeremyBA

Etihad many years ago had very similar / same seats. I used to travel to Australia a lot and etihad for about 2 years were half the price of ba. Didn’t last !

1Aturnleft

In which case add Qatars Q Suite to the ying-yang ish list too.

Adam Smith

After @1Aturnleft's earlier post, I was wondering whether they ever tried? Or did they feel the competitive advantage was so great that they had no desire to spread it around?

The other designs were not better in cost per square foot, but what about revenue per square foot? I recognize that it was innovative when it first arrived, but as soon as I flew the other products, I likely would have been happy to pay a meaningful premium to fly them over BA's. (As it was, I had flown a number of other lie-flat products before BA's and was appalled at how bad BA's was).

It's amazing they stuck with it as long as they did though. It has been wildly uncompetitive for quite some time, and a big part of why I was rarely interested in flying BA TATL.

1Aturnleft

I think had BA licenced the Club World flat bed mk1 product right at the beginning to other airlines then they could have made some serious money out of it. BA started to install them in 2000 when no competitor had a 180 degree flat bed in Business. Even Virgin was angled lie flat at that time and it wasn't until 2004 that they revealed their herringbone (flip seat) in Upper Class. So that's 4 years where BA were dominant in terms of hard product. Virgin licenced their flip seat to Air New Zealand who still use the product. The problem is BA then chose to rest on their laurels for far too long, evolving rather than revolutionising with reincarnations of old designs rather than upping their game with new technology and materials available. AKA the the Willie Walsh era.

If you don't mind me asking, who were you flying with who had such a fantastic flat bed product during the early incarnations? As far as I'm aware Virgin was the only other true competition on BA served markets in the early days (from 2004 onwards) and after this others slowly began to show their flat bed offering with varying degrees of success (United, Cathay, SAA, Delta, Air NZ are stand outs for me). Everything else was angled lie flat at best during this time (KLM, Lufthansa, Air France, American, Singapore) even until relatively recently and some well regarded airlines still are on certain aircraft types (Emirates 777)

Adam Smith

I didn't fly all that much back then; I think the first flat bed I flew in J was the AC product that was launched in about 2004-05. By the time I first flew the BA product we're talking about here, AC had already revamped their J cabins again after they introduced the 787 in 2013-14.

I've flown that VS product on NZ quite some time ago and still quite like it.

My comment was more hypothetical. If I had been flying the BA product for a few years and then the VS one came out (and the others that folllwed), I wouldn't have wanted to go back to BA. As opposed to what I actually did with my (very few) travel dollars at the time

1Aturnleft

It probably includes convenience and personal preference too, not just the ticket cost. AC started rolling out the XM project mid 2006 with something very similar to what Virgin were offering at the time. AC had the foresight to revolutionise in its next revamp where as BA figured all it needed to do was refresh the bones of what it already had. No other airline would have wanted to license the BA seat by this time so that boat had already sailed. BA were 6yrs too late. Rightly or wrongly from a customer experience perspective in not investing in product development at that time it was a cost effective revamp from an accounting and shareholder perspective.

With regards to ditching and switching products, I think that for customers paying out of their own pocket it would have been something many would have asked themselves. What it doesn't take into account is how many of those at the time were already locked in to BA Executive Club and the loyalty habits that many of us consider important for tier points and Avios today?

I was a BMI fan at the time so I was very Star Alliance centric in my travel plans. When BA absorbed them my travel habits began to swing towards BA and Oneworld. I think the power of a decent frequent flyer programme holds no bounds and would have retained a lot of passengers who would otherwise have looked elsewhere. BA knew this and incorporated this this theory into its decision making at the time by not investing into an updated product. I think simply they didn't feel they needed to. Quite arrogant when you think about it.

13901

I don't think it was arrogance. I don't think the culture of BA in the 2010s, having been in it, was arrogant. Rather, I think there was a lot of doubt and, almost, "soul-searching".

In the second half of Keith William's tenure as CEO there was a lot of pressure to come up with a new Club seat; those were the days when Cathay had launched the Zodiac Cirrus, AA was doing the same and although Zodiac was to earn (a completely deserved) horrible reputation for reliability and customer support it was a game changer indeed.

Frank Van der Post (who on these pages didn't get too much credit but in my view was a good guy with great ideas) and Keith were really aware of the need to come up with something new. I remember being asked about it in a Q&A in the Waterside Theatre; they were adamant they were falling behind, they knew the customers wanted a) all-aisle access and b) gate-to-gate IFE above all. But they were also really aware of the risk of cocking it up given the importance of Club World. I remember Frank saying something quite interesting: "The issue we have is that our configuration is really optimised in terms of achieving the best possible revenue per square foot".

At that time I was working in projects & programmes, but nothing fancy: mostly below the wing stuff. But our team also dealt with products and, you know, friends talk. One of us was working with Frank's team on products and, although they were super tight-lipped on everything (even Club Suite was a super secret, which was crazy as BA leaks like a sieve normally) and he was saying that they were agonising over avoiding yield degradation, which would then force revenue increase. Air France was mentioned as an example.

The product they were proposing was, in the end, a bit "meh". Some concepts were shown here. I think Club Suite is a way better deal, although it came at a cost (reduction/elimination of First and the denser Traveller cabin).

1Aturnleft

Paraphrasing this says we know the products crap but as we're yielding the best possible revenues from the floor space we're giving it, we'll keep it going. That has corporate arrogance written all over it. Acknowledgment that the product is outdated isn't really sufficiently addressing the issue is it. By the time Alex came along to squiggle his signature on a replacement Club World, the original flat bed design was fast approaching its 20th anniversary - a series of buck passes that ultimately had to be called. That in itself has to be a record. I can't think of any other hard product that's lasted that sort of test of time in a premium cabin - even Air Koryo has revamped their hard product within that time period!

13901

I respect your point of view, but that's not how I "felt" it. I'm exiting a business where there is a lot of corporate arrogance and that's never been what I felt at BA. In the past I used to call it the "Hugh Grant syndrome" (you know, those rom-coms where he's constantly undecided, blabbing and basically never quite making his mind up. The BA of old had a lot of that, in some departments more than others. Alex's one virtue was that he tried to change that but, being a mediocre leader, he chose largely mediocre people who in turn made mediocre decisions.

On the other hand, changing Club World wasn't something to be taken lightly and I do understand why it's taken so long. For starters, it's expensive. The pricetag for refurbishing a plane is well north of 60 million, depending on the size. The 77W refurbishment was a bit above half a billion euros. The other point is the risk of getting it wrong: besides not having a return on investment (in BA/IAG world if your business case doesn't have a ROIC of 10-15% it's likely not to go ahead unless it's about safety) you risk having to re-do it again. CX suffered some big losses with the business class seat they had before the Cirrus. Then there's the revenue risk: half of BA's revenue comes from Club World. Get it wrong and you've bankrupted the company. Finally, there's of course the operational risk: AA went with Zodiac, learnt the hard way how that was unwise and then had to rush in other products. They had 787s sitting somewhere in the desert for a while if I remember. Bottom line = it's a big thing, and BA, being the intrinsically cautious company it is, agonised over it for a long, long time.

Speedbirdjclass

And the state of the seat covers !

Raffles

If we're being totally honest, Club Suite is simply the seat Qatar Airways ditched 5 years ago for being outdated, with a door stuck on it.

13901

I think the B/E-Rockwell Diamond is a good product, a product that is indeed in use at many other airlines and one that is proved to be working. I don't know how well the concoction that BA was toying with before the Suite would've worked.

I'm wary of comparing other airlines with QR. Leaving aside my intrinsic distrust for that airline, it's also worth noting they aren't exactly in the business of making money and that it's been 5 years and yet they haven't found a way to shoehorn that thing into the 787s...

BrianDromey

This discussion comes up fairly frequently. The CW and NGCW seat were miles ahead of anything the market had seen before in business class. BA went from recliner to 180 flat bed in one go and the industry could not match the space, privacy and comfort of these seats for several generations. Initially the sloped-flat bed, then reverse herringbone. Only the arrival of seats like Cirrus on new aircraft like the 787 made NGCW truly uncompetitive. To ignore the mis-steps the likes of CX and AA made with their various attempts rewrites history. Even VS tried to re-invent the wheel in their A330s, instead rolling out the previous seat in their 787s. The original VS and BA seats were very space efficient, offered large, rectangular, flat surfaces for sleeping. Perhaps their London bases and BA's own F cabin kept them from further innovation. But even the likes of the Thomson Vantage is not without its own limitations in terms of foot coffins and not every seat has direct aisle access.
The credible rumour before CS was a version of NGCW yin-yang with direct aisle access and fixed TV monitors. I think this would have been a great product, but an off-the-shelf frame was the desired option.

Confus

What people conveniently forget when comparing BA with Middle Eastern carriers (and particularly QR) is that the latter are forced to have a better product by nature of what they’re selling - a 2am stop in the desert means they’re weaker from the start, plus the lower yields and density are a price they have to pay. And as QR has proved, doing this profitably is almost impossible - I think that given the choice even they would rather have the BA model.

I don’t speak for everyone of course... but for me personally, I am happy to pay more for BA, even in the yin-yang CW seat, for a direct flight and no traipsing through a desert terminal when I’d rather be asleep. And for the crucial corporate customers... I imagine most of those would be even more willing to pay the premium than cheapskate little me. With this in mind, I can totally see why BA would defer investment on a replacement for quite a while.

PGberkshire

I think the point is, its BA catching up to the market, not exceeding it or setting a new benchmark.

And boy do they bang on about it on the plane, its like they invented something new!

What BA (In FT'ers eyes) should have done is leapfrogged the market (like it did with Ying Yang) and come with someone thing amazing. It didn't.

In a few years when the other carriers hit refresh cycles, they will once again be ahead of BA.....