A P Yu

Its swings and roundabouts really when it comes to listening to crew though. As sometimes their recommendation is too heavily based on what works best for them and not necessarily the passenger. There are crew who often talk loudly that they know what customers want, some of them actually do, but others base it through very blinkered view at times.

SW7London

Indeed. However thats why senior management are charged with making decision based on various inputs.

Appears the wrong decision was made here.

AnaTravel

Competent leadership should know how to extract and utilise operational expertise, taking into account the points you make, A P Yu.

TedToToe

Absolutely right. A robust evaluation process and a robust decision making process.

GBOAC

On my first BA A350 flight (Nov 19) I asked the crew about the aircraft. They said they had transferred from the 747 fleet and were really struggling with the lack of a Central Galley. So it seems to have been a problem from day 1. Albeit in the 747 they were blessed with a Galley almost at every door! But it seems ridiculous not to have a third equipped facility in the middle of the aircraft. They would not really loose much (if any) seating from converting the 'dry galley' into a full one. Other than saving plumbing and weight (but how much?) it seems like a really inflexible decision was made.

Of course the hypothetical third galley itself is in an awkward location in that it would (presumably) have to cater for some of club, all of WTP and some of WT, in order to properly take the load off both of the other two facilities.

Cathay has a 3 Galley config for practically the same number of pax (334 vs 331), albeit less Premium heavy, with the second galley (behind Business) serving PE and front cabin of Y.

SW7London

I'd be interested to know if the plumbing etc was standard across the aircraft for all operators, just not connected in this case based on BA's preferences. Easier from a manufacturing perspective to design and build as standard as possible, with connection points if required by specific layouts chosen by operators. If this is the case then weight savings here would be minimal, the benefit would just be some(?) more space for seats.

(Side note - many years ago doing a tour of Sydney airport a Qantas engineer told us B747 layouts were fixed, with connections for galley's always at Doors 4, Toilets at Doors 3 & 5 and it was impossible to change despite Qantas wanting to do so!)

JFX1764

Simple answer is no.

ba273

On some 777's the flight crew rest area was in the First cabin at the rear on the aircraft right, I cannot remember if two or three seats were lost as a result of this.

paul21

I couldn't help myself so I made a crew friendly layout:


Crew don't have to walk far from the galley or reach across people to reach center seats, perfectly optimized for efficient meal delivery! Plenty of storage space for ice cream now that the passenger load has been reduced!


I also stuck the Iberian mid galley and non-optimized tail galley in the BA config for S&G.

It looks like the tail galley costs about 1 economy seat, while the mid galley costs 2 club world seats for the lavs and ~3 econ seats, though that's not optimized (front galley could be shrunk). Let's just say that it's 3 econ seats and 1 club world seat.

Guess: those service cuts cost 6 net promotor score points (NPS), i.e., 6% of customers now vote 1 of 5 or no longer vote 5 of 5, combined, on surveys. In general 4 points of NPS results in a 1% revenue premium increase, so it's a 1.5% revenue decline. On the current A350 that's 0.84 club seats and 4.1 economy seats (WTP+econ). It's a tough trade economically, but I would go for the NPS personally if it's really just 4-5 seats on the A350. My guess is they thought they could get away with the config for only 2-3 NPS impact.

TedToToe

The only problem I can see is the potential for passengers seated in the two economy bassinet seats suing BA due to their babies suffering from separation anxiety! Otherwise, near perfect.