To Fly. To Starve?

BA’s new brunch service suggests a dismal future for modern airline retailing

British Airways (BA) are now offering a brunch service on longhaul flights leaving before 11.29am. The menus look bonkers. According to Head for Points (HfP), a popular blog, travellers in Club World (BA’s supposedly swanky biz-class) get:

1. A starter, like smoked salmon, soup or artichoke

2. A breakfast course like waffles or sausage, mushrooms and hash browns

3. Chocolate cake, coffee and liqueurs

You can wash your breakfast down with a nice glass of red or white wine. The whole thing is, in the words of HfP, ”just weird”.

As well as the rather strange menu choices, BA have decided that any flight scheduled to leave before 11.29am will get this brunch menu. This choice looks far too late.

To see why, consider last Monday’s BA255 flight to Bridgetown, Barbados. Scheduled to depart at 11.25am, this flight will have featured brunch. Operated by Boeing 787-10 G-ZBLG, the flight left more or less on time and was airborne by 11.45am.

It will then take the crew about an hour to get everything ready for the service. So passengers will start to eat around 12.45pm. This is time for the full lunch, not brunch. If the flight had been delayed, which is not unusual at Heathrow, passengers would be eating their waffles or sausages at 1pm, 2pm or later.

For the many passengers connecting from Europe, which is one hour ahead of London, the brunch service is even less suitable.

So why has BA chosen this bizarre model? Obviously it is down to cost control. But why is the cutover point at exactly 11.29am? I have reverse-engineered their decision. Read on to find out how…

If passengers were eating brunch before say 11.00am, that would require a 9.15am departure. A departure leaving before 10.00am just might make brunch a reasonable offer. Unfortunately BA simply does not have many long-haul flights leaving that early.

I took the airline’s schedule for the day 6-Nov-24 from OAG Schedule Analyser (thanks OAG, visit www.oag.com!) and identified all the long-haul flights departing from Heathrow.

The table below shows that only 1% to 2% of the airline’s long-haul First, Club World and World Traveller Plus (premium economy) capacity departs before 9.00am. This is the early flight to New York JFK.

Before 10.00am, 14% of First seats and 11.8% of Club World and World Traveller Plus seats are scheduled to leave.

Before the 11.29am cutover point, 25% of First seats and 20.7% of Club World and World Traveller Plus seats leave.

BA’s reasoning is now clear. A business case to save money by serving brunch was proposed, and management will have pushed the service ending time back until it looked good. 20% was their magic number.

At the other end of the day BA are cutting costs too. They are offering a light meal only on flights that leave after 9.00pm. The table compiled from OAG data shows that this change affects 10.5% of First passengers and 12.2% of Club World and World Traveller Plus travellers.

Together, the cost cutting is expected to impact almost exactly one third of premium cabin travellers.

A beautiful number like one third is too much of a co-incidence for me to ignore. This is service design by accountants.

Choice will be eliminated entirely on nine out of 56 long-haul routes. Six of these will be brunch only:

Dallas Fort Worth, Tokyo Haneda, Houston, Lagos, Nassau and Nairobi

Three are scheduled for late light meal only:

Abuja, Abu Dhabi and Santiago

Nine routes will have a choice of brunch or a full meal service. These are:

Bridgetown, Mumbai, Boston, Delhi, New York Newark, New York JFK, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago

Four routes will have a choice of a late light meal or a full meal service. These are:

Cape Town, Dubai, Johannesburg and Singapore

[Remember that I have looked at one day only, routes like Tokyo Haneda will have other choices on other days]

Things might not be so bad on short flights like Abuja and Abu Dhabi. Nairobi will be a disaster as the flight leaves early-ish at 9.45am but due to the long 8:50 stage length and late 9.35pm arrival it completely fills the day and passengers will want more than a poached egg on toast.

I would hope that the ultra-long flights to Santiago, Singapore and South Africa are fully catered regardless. But I will not be surprised if they are not.

Overall, I expect the new brunch menu to be a disaster and it will hopefully be a matter of months before BA cancels it. They are not without form here. When a complex trolley based service was introduced in 2018 (see picture below) it took hours for the service to complete and the idea was terminated quickly.

The prognosis for modern airline retailing is terrible. Consider these two conclusions:

1. The 11.29 cut-off point and the resulting optimistic-case 12.45pm service delivery time shows that BA decision-makers either do not understand or do not think through what the service will actually be like in practice

2. The exactly-one-third of passengers impacted shows that services are designed by or for accountants, not the travelling public

When BA is taking decisions like this, how are they supposed to operate effectively in an offer-order retailing environment?

The standard industry response would be to say that offer-order will be entirely driven by algorithms so it will be all OK. Some people would even say that a simply bad product like BA’s brunch service would not be designed in the offer-order world because data would show passengers would not want it. But this misses the point.

Algorithms are designed and monitored according to the priorities of their human controllers. When these priorities are messed up, as the case of brunch shows they will be, the algorithms will simply not work.

Offer-order is seen by airlines mainly as a technical challenge. And when it comes to the technical matters I am sure that British Airways’ solutions will be second to none. After all, they have the might of travel IT giant Amadeus behind them. Since they are an Amadeus “driver customer” it is fair to say that what goes down at British Airways will influence the industry.

Unfortunately the case of brunch suggests that the future of offer-order at British Airways is to be a disaster because they just do not understand what their passengers want. Since BA’s approach to the technology will influence almost every other airline, the future of modern airline retailing looks dismal for passengers all over the world.

There is a simple solution. Airlines need to train their staff to think like passengers.

Managers should fly several times a year as commercial passengers. They should pay on their own credit card and reclaim expenses like millions of business travellers do. It need not cost anything more than a trivial amount of money if these flights are otherwise not busy.

Unfortunately we all know this will not happen. To fly. To starve.

oliver AT ransonpricing DOT com

oliver DOT ranson AT inkaviation DOT com