From BAd To Worse

It seems not a day goes by without another tale of woe from BA and I have blogged before about an airline that is dying a death of a thousand cuts.

It turns out I was wrong - it's around 1,700 cuts, of jobs that is plus a pay freeze. Well that's just the latest round. Further, this is just a week after BA launched an ill-fated new Business Class only service to New York from City Airport when two such airlines operating similar models have gone bust inside the last 12 months. Despite CEO Willie Walsh claiming that this service would be profitable in a year, all indications are that it was dead before it took off. In the launch interview he even claimed BA was on the verge of buying another airline that is slowly dying, Iberia. I have said it before but I think Walsh is BA's problem - he just seems to lurch, punch drunk from one bad idea to the next and just does not seem to have in his mind a cogent strategy for survival. And that is the key here - after a £401m loss last year, the biggest since it privatised in 1987, BA will announce another loss this quarter and it is battling for survival. In many respects, an ill-starred takeover of another ailing airline is about the worst way to spend precious cash.

But Walsh soldiers on. Amidst several petty ways to save cash he is now taking on the Unions in promoting the idea that many staff should take early retirement or voluntary redundancy. There is also an issue over the roll of cabin crew for the future where the proposal is to drastically change the current roles, slashing their status and pay and bringing on new recruits at rock bottom prices. The staff are up in arms as, rightly, the former 'World's favourite Airline' had a good reputation on service and that's what kept customers loyal. But it seems that BA is losing itself in a 'Neverland' as it is caught in the vanilla whirlpool of budget airline menu-style services and high quality class service that customers pay a lot of money for. BA is a strategic dead duck and that flows right the way to the top. The final straw could be a strike of any sort - a prolonged one would almost certainly bring a failing airline to its knees.

Central to BA's woes has been the depletion of the higher class cabins as customers book more economy flights in the face of a recession. The passenger figures in that category are 13% down year on year and falling. Despite several silly offers to get people to upgrade by offering a free ticket when buying Club of First Class, or if you buy at economy ticket you are offered to buy an upgrade on one or more legs for idiotic prices considering you have usually just paid over the odds for a higher priced ticket anyway, BA has not stopped the exodus from the higher class seats. This means that these seats at the front of the airline are going empty.

But BA have several other problems, to my mind. The first is a silly rigidity about changing tickets once bought. If you arrive for a flight early and want to see if you can get on an earlier flight, BA, unless you have paid stupid money for a fully flexible ticket, do not allow such a useful thing. It means that seats go empty on the early flight but had they been filled, the later flight would have empty seats which BA would then have time to sell. And at any price, as it would be incremental money. Not so with BA (many airlines suffer from this dumb logic). They actually try to charge more for these newly freed up seats and so they remain empty whereas simple logic would say as long as you are covering the cost of the meal and and the fuel, you are making some money rather than cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Further, it remains to be seen whether Walsh and his management team understand where the future lies for BA. You can cut costs easily in a business like that without thinking hard and the biggest issue will be the Unions. Given that you think that you can handle the Unions, what is it you want to the airline to do after you have cut all the costs and ditched the staff? Do you want to be a flagship, high service carrier or do you want to be a low budget, menu-service airline? If so the latter, you are in the wrong place today as your hubs are the two most expensive of airports and you have a purpose-built terminal to handle customers. Yet that's what seems to be the plan - as BA sequentially withdraw simple things like meals and seat booking to charge for them but they do not lower the prices of the ticket in return.

In the middle of all this remains the staff - loyal and capable people who love the airline and give the service that the company was once famed for and proud to advertise. Effectively, Walsh is trashing their skills and abilities and looking to replace them with 'Easyjet-style' crew. The result could be tragic in terms of service - make no bones about it. The difference in the levels of ability and skill of cabin staff between low budget and BA is enormous and there is an immense confidence factor involved. If an incident occurred in mid air, I know who I would want to be running the plane - I think I best summarise it as that. On the last Easyjet flight I was on, we were served by a young man wearing a stewardess's outfit bought from a joke shop with his boxer shorts sticking out from his mini skirt as the staff laughed at the unwitting groom-to-be and took photos. Good fun but airlines are, in fact, serious business.

I wonder why the investors in BA carry on with the current management. From the Terminal 5 total fiasco to the series of knee-jerk, almost fag-packet attempts to save the business to a total lack of strategy, the airline is slowly dying and Walsh seems powerless and witless to do anything about it. The enduring image I have of him of late is his interview on the converted Airbus 318 taking off from City Airport, refuelling at Shannon and going on to New York running an already dead Club-only service for just 100 passengers talking of his new attempt to take over an equally dying airline, Iberia.

It was all wishful thinking.

A Slow, Lingering Death By Cuts

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, is one of the following: 1) a desperate man clutching at any old idea to save money, 2) A desperate man who has no idea how to run a flagship airline, 3) a desperate man who has lost touch with his customers or 4) all of the above.

After the bold and inventive move of withdrawing free meals to Economy Class customers on most short haul flights that frankly no one missed, he has now come up with equally bold but this time, terribly misjudged, idea of charging for seat selection on flights. And we are not talking a nominal charge either, we are talking £20 per person, per long haul trip and £10 for short haul. For a family of four flying on holiday, this is another £160 on a flight and is akin to the racketeering on parking at airports.

This is now down into Ryan Air and Easyjet territory where you can choose to have priority boarding so you possibly can get the seat you want – but it costs far less, even though it’s just a method of queue jumping. I have flown Ryan Air recently and watched how, for dreadful service, prices ratchet up quickly for providing the most basic things for travel which you cannot avoid, like checking in, for example. But BA has got itself embroiled in the area that is fast diminishing the benefits of low cost travel – the additional costs of flying. What is more, let’s not fool ourselves that online check in and seat selection gives you exactly the seat you want – you just find the one that is available avoiding the middle seat in a group of 3 or getting a window or aisle. The chances of designating your row are minimal. It’s a different service but I came back on Eurostar on Friday where online check in told me there was just ONE seat available in my entire coach but when I got on, every table seat was empty. Every one of them – totally bizarre.

More than this, it shows that Walsh and BA have no real underlying strategy. Common sense tells us in order to compete with budget airlines you have to either differentiate your offering so substantially that people automatically value the price difference as being worth the extra price or you simply get down and dirty and compete at the same level. BA seems to be lost in the ‘Neverland’ in between where they want to maintain premium and differentiated service but now are charging for incrementally on standard fares – not budget ones. In other words, as with the withdrawal of meals, there is to be no corresponding decrease in the base cost of the air ticket which included a meal and seat selection, now you pay the same base fare and more if you want the services previously charged for, not ‘additional’ services as BA are trying to call them. To the simple-minded traveller like me, this is purely a price rise.

BA has had a very troubled year. The Terminal 5 fiasco was the pre-cursor to a lot of under par services in what is a great terminal. The main area is already crowded, half the damn thing has yet to built and so you are bussed to all points around the airport, passport control is usually undermanned when peak times occur and the security checking, and this is shameful, is a huge bottleneck – to the extent that the North entry is reserved for those late for their flights, while the South entrance is for those who have turned up in good time. Think about that – you do what the airline asks and allow plenty of time to check in and your reward is that you queue longer, while it encourages you to actually leave less time, turn up late and you get through security with no queues in just minutes. Go figure.

And let’s not get started on how many channels are available and numbers of staff or the lack of ‘redressing area’ to put all the articles you have taken off back on again. It is so poorly thought through as to make the experience very annoying for the frequent traveller.
To add to BA’s woes it has had to raise £600m of new capital, ask its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals while it has lost shed loads of money. It has been an airline which has relied on the large profits it makes at the front of the aircraft in Club and First Class and, as the recession has bitten, less have been taking such seats. It means the Economy Class has had to compete with the budget airlines, who have been kept out of Heathrow which has worked to their advantage as the airport is rapidly becoming one of the most inaccessible, over-priced building sites in Britain.

The strategy appears to be lacking or is just wrong. Once the airline famous for being the ‘World’s Favourite’ and sponsoring the London Eye, people now remember it more for the annoying introduction music to every piece of video on board which has not changed for years. The plan seems to be a series of knee jerk reactions to the cost base in the airline and strategy has flown out of the window. This is very typical of a weak, indecisive management who have been brought up on the mantra, ‘Milk the good times and cut costs in the bad times’. The reality is that BA has been enduring a slow death for many years and it was humiliated earlier this year when it tried to buy lowly Iberian Airlines only to find when the price was to be paid that BA’s share price had suffered so badly that Iberia was worth more than them.

The daftness pervades. This week, my colleagues and I are off to Portugal for a two day set of meetings. The only BA seats left were Club at £850 round trip – TAP was £430 for the same route, arriving in time to start our meetings at 10.00 prompt whereas BA could not get us in before 11.00. For the loss of a meal and the use of the BA Lounge, we get TAP Economy that does you breakfast on a 2 hour flight. Again, go figure.

Willie Walsh has a tough, tough job at the top of a struggling airline but I would argue that he has little idea about a vision that would see BA redefine itself to recover from these bad times – in fact, I would assert his ideas are making matters worse. Instead they wallow in a series of ill-judged moves that will drive frequent travellers away from them as the lure of cheaper tickets for the same benefits at easier to access regional airports become a reluctant no-brainer.

If I had BA shares, which thank the Lord I don’t, I would sell. Quickly.

Slow Going At Iberia Airways

I read only yesterday that demand for Iberia Airways had slowed. How serendipitous it was that I was sat in Barcelona Airport enduring a delay at the hands of the same airline.

The two things may have been an unfortunate happenstance but taken with my experience of flying out with people over-packed in a small departure area at Gate 11 in Heathrow Terminal 3, getting onto a heaving plane and taking off an hour late, perhaps it is the norm for the airline. On board, everything is chargeable and although the flight attendants are invariably polite, handsome or pretty, it doesn't make up for the fact you are shelling out a whacking €2.50 for a tomato juice.

The return journey had all the hallmarks of a smooth event. I arrived early-ish to see if I could get on the earlier flight. Iberia is one of the few airlines who actually will try to get you a seat on an earlier flight without laughing in your face and asking you to pay a bank bail out figure for a new ticket as BA does. They tried, but the flight was full. I thought to myself that the Telegraph clearly does not know what it is talking about when it comes to demand. But the Barcelona-London route is incredibly popular.

In the week, I had to arrange a flight to Barca, then on to Madrid and back to London. Iberia came out as over £900 for the itinerary. I costed it up using Easyjet for the out and inbound legs and it was half the price. Iberia clearly have a price problem as they are competing against budget airlines but trying to pass off their service as premium.

So sitting at Barcelona airport yesterday I noted that all the Easyjet flights got away on time and that many Iberia flights were half empty to destinations like Lyon and Bordeaux. So when a London flight was called, I duly queued only to find that in fact I was in the line for the earlier flight to London which should have taken off two hours before and was turned away for obvious reasons. Reassuringly, our flight was called next and it seemed to be maybe just a few minutes late only. We got aboard the bus to take us, having had our boarding cards torn or the copies taken, passports were checked and on we went. The bus did a languid circuit before arriving at the plane and the two pilots could be seen doing their checks in the cockpit. The bus stayed outside, doors firmly shut and pumping humid air into the passenger compartment. The notion was dawning that something was wrong. A lady in a yellow jacket walked down the steps, muttering into her walkie-talkie, struggling to put on her sunglasses to look more officious and conferred with our driver. Without a word, he nodded and we were driven back to the gate and the doors opened and, like condemned sheep at the slaughterhouse, we disembarked without a single word uttered to any of us. When inside the gate we learned that the pilot was not actually checking his instruments but more likely barfing into a bag as he had come over all sick. Or perhaps it was a ruse as he had tickets to a bullfight or whatever, or was on a promise.

We were told that a new pilot would be found - relax, they are an airline after all so they should have plenty. We sat back in our places and waited a while. Then the chaos started.

An announcement told us that the flight was now delayed until 18.45 which was over a two hours delay. People were disgruntled but slowly began to disperse and I went upstairs, found a bar and sat down with my paper, a packet of peanuts and a frothy cerverza. I had munched the bag of peanuts and taken two sips of the amber nectar when an announcement, barely audible above the hub-bub, told me that the flight was now delayed until 19.00. I sat back and sipped my beer, called my wife and tried to chill out.

Minutes, later, maybe half a pint's worth, an announcement told us that the flight was ready for boarding. It seemed we were getting away no more than an hour late at this rate. I gulped down the half of beer I had left, picked up my bags and went to the gate where a small throng of people had accumulated but was suspiciously, and markedly, smaller than the original number that had tried to get on the flight. After several more sweaty minutes, the buses arrived and we had the daft charade of staff trying to work out who we were from the remains of our boarding passes; the security guys just wafted us past without looking at our passports and we got on the bus. Someone told me that a pilot had arrived from Madrid and was, I assume, about to knock off but was told to take the plane to London and back. It's hardly the same as asking a taxi driver to do one more fare, this was a 4-6 hour round trip. I didn't even think about whether his inbuilt tachometer had enough hours left, the instinct to get home was strong. We all boarded and there were chaotic scenes as a family seated around me found that there were already people in their places. A farcical game of musical chairs was played and the poor chap who lost just stood there like a lemon holding his boarding card stub with a face like a slapped backside thinking, 'What about me?'. He was duly whisked off the business class which he seemed consoled about until he realised it was two small rows at the front with a curtain behind it.

Amid all the confusion, three things struck me. One, my row was empty except me. Two, there seemed to be far less people on the flight that had originally queued and three, a rather annoying tape of music was playing of really drab music sung by the likes of Katie Melua. An announcement proclaimed that indeed, passengers had dispersed across the acreage of Barcelona airport and many could not be found - we were 24 short and could not take off without them. The tape whined on, louder if anything.

We waited with increasing agitation for the missing people as the tape played on and you could feel a Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch brewing. People arrived and there was more confusion as another family arrived to try and sit exactly where the first family had displaced the original occupants of the rows around me. Once more there was a game of musical chairs ending in the bizarre situation of one family being split by the other - how they could not have been rearranged simply so that each sat together seemed beyond the pretty airhostesses, but organisation was not to be their strength.

The first fuse blew a few seconds later, as a pompous grey-haired Englishman threw down his Blackberry in rage and screeched for the music to be turned off. He had peaked too early - the pilot simultaneously announced that due to the late arrivals we had missed our take off slot and now had to wait until 19.40 to get away. Given we had started to board at around 18.15, this was a long time to spend on the plane in the turgid heat, listening to the moaning music. Tempers were starting the fray.

The pompous man pressed his call button for the first time and the hostess arrived swiftly. He demanded to know why we were late. She explained in clipped English that passengers had thought that the plane would not take off until 19.00 and so had gone to eat and clearly had not heard the new announcement. Fortunately, everything was running so late that when they came down to board for the time they thought they had to, we were all waiting for them. He was particularly dissatisfied and started a rant about the fact that no one had offered any free drinks or a sandwich, which was a fair point, and it may be sensible to crack open the bar with some freebies to keep the punters happy. She smiled sweetly and said she needed higher authorisation and the man replied, 'Who? The bloody Pope?'

This final remark was returned with a frosty glare and his card had obviously been marked. I mentally noted to myself that if I were him, I wouldn't order a sandwich tonight as visions of 'Road Trip' and french toast came to mind. He chanced his arm at one last thing before the hostess retreated - could she change the damn tape as it was driving him crackers. She smiled and said yes and left. She did not change the tape, if anything, I could have sworn it got louder as some fool droned out a cover of 'What a Wonderful World' for what seemed the nth time.

We sat and waited for the take off slot and mercifully the captain managed to get the air conditioning to work and an ominous vapour appeared above the overhead lockers as fresh, cool air was pumped into the stuffy cabin. The pompous man started nattering his complaints to a general audience, none of whom spoke back or looked at him. He was now openly declaring it would be the last time he flew on Iberian and I could feel the share price almost plummet as he spoke. And the tape was now, he made clear to us all, 'Doing my bloody head in.' He had a point - the damn thing was now playing, for at least the third time, a saxophone version of 'Hark the herald angels sing' which was highly inappropriate, and awful, given the stifling humidity of the cabin. I realised that I had heard the very same tape on the flight over and the whole jigsaw of why Iberian were suffering lower passenger manifests was now dawning on me. The service was rubbish and the music was crap.

At precisely 19.15, for no apparent reason and without warning, the captain started his engines and we trundled off from our position. He came on the intercom and said that we were still on for a 19.40 take off but he would hold at a point to wait his turn at the end of the runway and it might be useful in case we were given an earlier slot. I liked his style while mentally trying to calculate how much precious fuel that might burn in doing so and approximately what tonnage of CO2 we might be unnecessarily pumping into the atmosphere but erased the thought as the lure of getting home and having a cold glass of wine and a shower was far too strong.

We got to our holding point and, as if the pilot had seen a gap in the traffic, we rapidly turned onto the runway and, again without any warning, we gunned our engines and we were hurtling down the runway at a rate of knots, giving the air crew just enough time to stow their accessories from the safety demo and get to their seats. We were airborne in short order and still the music droned on above the scream of the engines as the plane sought height with the City lights to our left, the sea to our right and turbulence all around us. The skipper announced he had got clearance to go - which was a relief to us all as I had visions of some other captain shouting into his radio, 'Oi, stop that man. That's my take off slot,' or worse - and he said that the expected flight time would be one hour and fifty minutes but he would see if he could shorten that. Whether his Sat Nav allowed the selection of shortest and fastest routes, I don't know, but maybe he knew a short cut across the Bay of Biscay or he was just going to keep the throttle at maximum. I opened my book while nervously hoping that he was keeping a close eye on that fuel gauge after all.

The inflight service is rubbish on Iberia. I actually bought a sandwich combi which included a beer. The beer was fine, the sandwich dry and tasteless and all for €9.50 which would have made Michael O'Leary slather with excitement. The pompous man was moaning about free drinks but did not mention the Pope again, although he did once more ask if the tape could be changed or turned down. Again the staff smiled and nothing further was done about it. The families around me snored quietly despite the bumpy ride and before we knew it, we were descending toward Heathrow. Of course, as we had evidently nicked someone else's slot across France, we had arrived early and we were sent to detention in a holding pattern somewhere near Croydon as we flew repeatedly over the 'twenty pence' building by the station at East Croydon. The music had been turned up as part of the landing preparations and now the pompous man was scrunched up in his seat with his eyes shut and fingers placed in his ears. Every now and then he would take them out and shout, 'This effing music is doing my head in,' to which a lady near by said, 'Just effing ignore it like the rest of us.' The retort was a mistake as clearly he wanted to engage someone in the argument and he berated her for the poor service, delays, and rubbish music as if the lady owned the airline. She took it all pretty well before calmly saying, 'I hope you feel better for getting that off your chest. Sadly, for you, I can do bugger all about it so just shut up.' I was waiting to join in the round of applause but there was none so I just pretended I was clapping along to the music.

When we finally got on our approach, the plane was blown all over the place with the engine pitch going up and down like a dentist's drill. Looking out of the window I was sure we were being blown off course or would land upside down - if we had any fuel left. But as always, just feet above the runway, the air seemed clear but it did not stop the captain from putting down the plane with a huge thump, on one wheel. As soon as he got the second down, the nose went down with a mighty bang and the brakes were applied very heavily. The music went up several decibels and we were back at someone's monotonous version of 'Clouds' which the pompous man screamed at.

More chaos ensued as the plane stopped short of its parking position and several Koreans leapt to their feet to retrieve their bags from the overheads. One locker opened and a laptop bag, complete with laptop inside, dropped out and bounced off the side of a man's head. The Korean was unrepentant while the man rubbed his head in bewilderment - if only it had been the pompous man. It was clear several people had connecting flights to places like Korea, New Zealand and Australia but there were no announcements about priorities or that there were staffing waiting - it was every man for himself. Duly, the pompous man bellowed into his phone that his driver was to take him for an 'effing curry' and he got his bag and started barging his way down the plane. At this point, I had had enough as he was distressing an Indian gentleman who was trying to herd his kids in the cramped space ahead of me. I made myself 'big' which is difficult for a small chap but all those years of rugby finally paid off. The man attempted to get past but I just stood my ground.

'Some of us are in an effing hurry,' he said, possibly to whoever was on his Blackberry as he still had it to his ear. I ignored the comment. He then began pushing, while still jabbering into his phone. I stood still - the kids were delaying us all but I didn't care as I deliberately waved people ahead of me to carry on. Pompous man lost it. 'I said I was in an effing hurry,' he said to the back of my head as if I cared.

We finally got off the plane and as we were on the jetway, pompous man tried to overtake. I blocked his line skillfully and he really got angry as he told whoever was on the phone that he would call back. 'What's your problem?' he demanded of me, as he tried to struggle past. 'The kids on the jetway don't need to get run over by people like you or listen to your language, mate. Just grow up and wait your turn,' was my terse reply.

He wasn't impressed, then again that wasn't the aim. He waited for his opportunity at the end of the jetway and then stormed past mouthing something to himself which clearly made him feel better. The glorious moment came when we got to Passport Control. There were literally thousands of people in a massive queue going back out of the hallway. Pompous man barged his way through to the Fast Track lane and he literally sprinted down it. We all slowly made our way into the normal section where a sign said '25 minutes wait from this point'. Minutes later, pompous man was being led back in angry conversation with an immigration official who was telling him that the black restrainer he had ignored was to show that Fast Track was closed. As pompous man tried to blend into the queue way ahead of the end, a rather burly bloke next to me put an arm out and said, 'Go to the end, smart arse - I've had enough of you for one night.' In splendid slow motion, he was led away by the official toward the back of the huge queue stretching all the way back almost to our jetway. It was the last I saw of the idiot.

But my focus on the pompous man served a purpose. I could have been pompous man with great ease. I usually get very uptight about airline service and delays - more specifically the lack of information. In this instance, the information had not only been lacking but the little that did come out was conflicting, causing further, unnecessary delays. Iberia should have laid on a few drinks or food vouchers, there were a lot of kids on the flight and they must have been hungry and thirsty by the time we took off, some three hours late. There is no excuse for poor or no communication and it is the single most irritating thing about air travel. You expect it of Ryan Air and Easyjet as they have the mind set that 'what you don't pay for, you don't get' and with them service is certainly that, respect is another. But Iberia are not low budget and they are not cheap.

So if Iberia Airways has a problem on demand then last night's performance will not have helped as there were many on the flight who vowed never to use them again - I dare say pompous man was one and I was certainly another.

One last comment on the joys of international travel - what on earth was happening at Terminal 3? Going out on Wednesday was bad enough as the terminal was crowded to the gills and the departure gate seating far too small for the manifest of people for the aircraft which took an age to check through. But passport control was a shambles coming back last night, with at least a thousand people queuing and very few positions manned. When they did, eventually, open up a couple more positions, the staff then blatantly took an age to check each passport, almost inviting the inevitable rudeness they got from several people. The queuing system was shambolic as well with people shoving and moving around and no actual lines formed. Contrast this to somewhere like the US where there are regularly large volumes of people to be checked, there are always well organised lines and people to direct you, however officious and sour-faced they may be.

Heathrow is decending into a mess and depsite a brand new terminal being built to ease the loads on the others, it has got far, far worse. It is not a pretty sight for foreign travellers arriving, it's chaos for EU arrivals and it has nothing to do with more rigorous checks - it is simply lack of staff at peak times and slow systems that take around 30 seconds to check a home country passport.

That, at least, cannot be blamed on the luckless Iberian Airlines.

No Flying Sandwiches

It is a dark day when BA announces that it is banishing the free meal from its short haul flights.

I use the term 'meal' loosely as I am referring to the dreaded BA sandwich. I mean, it wasn't as if it was gourmet fare anyway but to take away perhaps the last bastion of differentiation between the national carrier and low-cost, no frills airlines is close to rock bottom. It seems also to be the limit of the creative thinking of an increasingly beleaguered CEO, Willie Walsh.

True, by banishing the rather poor sandwich and chocolate tit bit from flights after 10.00am (fear not, breakfast on flights before 10.00am remain reassuringly unaffected by this callous measure) that last less than two and a half hours saves the struggling airline £22m which cannot be overlooked. However, when passengers start making comparisons with other or low-cost airlines you have to start thinking, what is the difference?

I have to say I am no fan of Ryan Air. Until recently, you had to queue endlessly at Stansted in order to get checked in but they have now introduced online and electronic check in at the airport. Somewhat strangely, but typical of Ryan Air, you pay for the privilege of checking yourself in. In fact, you pay for everything. By the time you have added the whole thing up, if the bare fare was not as low as £3.99 then you may as well book a flat fare with BA.

You think I'm kidding? No way.

If you travel with a bag to check in and particularly if the bag carries more than a toiletry bag and a few items to wear, then you are looking at excess baggage charges which themselves are excessive. You can easily start paying Ryan Air some distance over a BA airfare. When you start adding in the fact in most cases you get rained on when walking to the aircraft because they are too stingy to afford renting jetways and that you cannot get the seat you want unless you pay more for the most idiotic and useless 'priority boarding' system which is policed by nobody, then you start to realise why O'Leary and his shareholders are making such excellent profits.

The trick for low-cost airlines is simple volume. There is no point in buying and flying expensive aircraft if you cannot utilise them to the full. So each plane is flown as many times a day as it can fit in, so the shorter the distance of the flight, the better. And it is turned around as fast as it can at each destination while the number of seats occupied each flight should be as high as possible, which is where the price gimmickry comes from. It is a recipe for over crowded planes and low service levels but 67m will fly Ryan Air alone this year which is 15% up from last year. And they are not alone with Easyjet in hot pursuit.

The key to success is the explosion of routes. Between Easyjet and Ryan Air, the number of interesting new places to visit has grown enormously over the last 10 years. We may laugh that we often get our imaginations stretched as to what constitutes a flight to Stockholm or Brussels but by and large the routes are superb. Take flying to Valencia as an example. It is one of the largest cities in Spain, just 100km from the northern edges of 'Britville' holidays, it hosts some of the biggest conferences in Europe, the Americas Cup in 2007 and in a few weeks time it will host the F1 Grand Prix of Europe on a superb street circuit - it is also home to one of the best football teams in Europe. Try flying there by either BA or its partner, Iberia, and you are looking at a two flight hop costing a minimum of £700. Or you can choose a direct flight with either Easyjet or Ryan Air. Even when you get to the low-cost airlines, choice is crucial. Easyjet was almost twice the cost of Ryan Air, and it only flies once a day to the destination. Ryan Air won hands down.

This year, as a supporter of London Wasps rugby club, I hope to take in at least one of their away European games. I have been to Paris, Biarritz and Treviso to support them in the past but they have also played at several southern French and northern Italian towns only accessible by low cost airlines. Then there are the people who either buy or rent holiday homes - imagine the ability to simply hop for a long weekend to a home near Perpignan?

And there is the business element. With premium cabins like Club Europe faltering, I cannot think why I would choose BA to fly short haul these days. Luton Airport is just 25 minutes up the road from me, the parking is cheaper and the terminal is fine. Easyjet and Ryan Air fly regularly to Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Manchester and Amsterdam as well as a variety of other major cities combining convenience and low-cost for the business traveller, particularly if you are away only a short time. Stansted is not bad either - apart from places like Valencia, it was my only access point to fly to Montpelier when working for a company with an HQ down there previously. Heathrow, for anyone north of London is almost inaccessible with the M25 widening roadworks set to be with us for the next 3 years (yes, I am serious) and then short term parking is so costly and far away from the terminals to render the whole process a nightmare.

The formula for budget airlines may indeed be spartan but you have to admit they have seriously taken BA to task. The stuffy, backward airline pinned so much of its hopes on Terminal 5 only to see all the access it has built to the terminal bottlenecked by a seriously congested motorway network. And then, what the hell happened to the airconditioning at Terminal 5? It is is built with so much glass that it's like a greenhouse whenever there is more than a few rays of sun, making the whole travel experience a rather unpleasantly sticky affair. Also, knowing what we now know about airport security and the time, hassle and inconvenience it adds to a journey, why on earth did they plan the entrance into the airside area of the new terminal so badly? I am even leaving out the most disastrous piece of project management I have witnessed in a while when they actually commissioned the new terminal.

Yet on soldiers Willie Walsh. I don't know what photos he has of Board members and big shareholders, but they must be pretty compromising for him to still be in a job. He has happily presided over the most incredible swing of profitability to major loss in a single year that has been seen in the UK. In that time, all the major and minor flaws of the airline have been exposed and rather than making a huge shift in strategy and tactics at the airline, we are seeing it respond by imploring its staff to take salary holidays and axing the meagre meals on short haul flights. In small business terms, this is the equivalent of not buying fresh flowers once a week for reception or axing the monthly staff pizzas - both of which I have personally done in response to poor performance and in both cases I saw a disproportionate drop in staff morale and a decrease in my managerial credibility as a result.

Willie Walsh has a further problem. Getting rid of the monthly pizzas for me got me bad press within my company - for Walsh, this is national news. Many years ago as a trainee salesperson at Hewlett-Packard, the free biscuits for staff were rescinded as part of a global cost cutting measure. You may as well have asked staff to take a pay cut or axe the annual staff bonus - it was taken that seriously internally. But Walsh's actions are public and customer facing. Taking away the motley sandwich was part of the service and cost of a ticket. By saving £22m publicly he is not taking the same amount of the price of tickets. He is also announcing that the cost of the sandwich was trivial compared to the price of the ticket as £22m spread across each ticket sold is pennies.

We were paying a premium for this particular sandwich, and now Willie Walsh has told us just how much of premium.

And that had been BA's flawed business model for some time. Without the profit at the front of spaces on the aircrafts, as premium passengers watch the pennies in these troubled times, the whole business of flying anybody from A to B becomes loss making to an airline like BA with such a massive cost base.

Cutting a measly sandwich is one of the few responses to the crisis of an idealess CEO. It also sends the worst possible message to its customers - "We were ripping you off for the cost of a sandwich".

BA needs far more than this to be a credible force of the future. Once, it dominated the landing slots in the UK and so stifled competition by being big. Virgin chipped away at that and brought innovation and service as well as price competition to BA at its two main hubs. Then the budget airlines came from left field. Instead of competing for slots at the national hubs, they picked off the subsidiary airports who were hungry to compete with Heathrow and Gatwick and there was no shortage of investment to support this - and certainly no shortage of customers to justify it.

In fairness to Walsh, the rot set in on BA a long time ago - and was compounded when they capitulated their own low-cost airline, Go, to Easyjet. But his woeful performance under pressure has contributed badly to the past mistakes and could possibly see BA lose its national carrier status in the not too distant future.

It will take a great deal more than losing a sandwich to make a difference at BA and far more focus will go on how they properly spend the extra £600m of cash they have recently raised. I would wager it will be the making or breaking of Willie Walsh in short order and, frankly, on his performance so far, I don't give him a chance.

A Sign of The Times?

I always remember Terminal 2 at Heathrow on a Monday morning for having security queues the length of the terminal and then back round on itself and check-ins fuller than a Wagamama queue at Saturday lunchtime in St Albans. This Monday morning, 12 January, there were no queues - anywhere. Is this a sign of the times?

Travel Industry Being Hit?

I know BA announced good profits last quarter and both Ryan Air and EasyJet still talk bullishly, but this morning, for the second time in less than a few weeks, I have been shocked by the small numbers of people at Heathrow Airport. I wonder if anyone else has observed the same or am I just lucky on timing?

I have some acquaintances in the travel industry and there is no doubt that leisure travel is significantly down with one major travel firm I know experiencing a 40% drop in revenue although conversely their profits had held good.

If my experience is anything to go by, my 6.00am Alitalia Flight to Rome this morning had absolutely no queue at the check-in, no queue at security and less than 25 people on the flight, including the attendants. We got away on time and arrived in Rome early. I can't remember the last time that ever happened to me on a Monday morning - even the traffic heading into Heathrow was very light.

The Terminal 5 Effect?

After the fiasco of Terminal 5's pathetic start up last year, perhaps the collective easing at Terminals 1 & 2 is now visible - I doubt it. In my experience, with the lack of automatic check-ins for most continental airlines, the check-in counters at Alitalia are usually mobbed an hour before the flight by cackling people in expensive suits or ski outfits. So having packed hand luggage only and checked-in the night before, I arrived far too early and could have had an extra 30 minutes in bed.

However, Dunn's Law of Consequential Effect, would have come in to play. This Law states that if you believe that any one of the following are true 1) the traffic will be light, 2) check-ins not full or 3) security queues not long, then if you allow less than rush hour times to get to the airport, then automatically all 3 assumptions will be wrong resulting in lateness equalling the cube of your delayed start time. This has been verified by extensive results in live experiments causing several missed flights and journeys of great stress.

Empty Economy, Packed Business Class

No this is not the title of some fantastical Chinese film. One curious observation of this morning's flight, was that the small, cramped section of Business Class of just 3 rows at the front were full, while the rest of us 'nose-pickers' spread ourselves out luxuriously in Economy Class for the 2 hour flight. Quite how firms can justify Business Class fares costing at least treble the price of economy on such short trips is beyond me, particularly in a recession. But then again I have always believed this for short hops. It's just companies adding to the perks of short-hop managers who are probably finding any excuse to be on a plane in order to look busy while accruing their tiered points for Executive Club so they can have nice holidays and get promoted to Gold next year - maybe even that BA Amex Card they all dream of. And it's not only greedy Bankers, lawyers and Accenture employees at that game. I once flew to Dusseldorf when the ENTIRE Business Class section was taken up by Vodafone employees, several of whom turned up to the meeting I was attending, which was ironic as I was pitching on webconferencing to help reduce their travel costs.

It struck me, as we landed at Rome, that perhaps Alitalia might have broken even on the empty flight thanks to those generous people in Business Class paying well over the odds for their tickets.

Good News for Emissions, Bad News for The Economy

The boom in continental air travel thanks to the likes of Taxless citizens like Stelios, has helped fuel the economy while transporting all those who leveraged their equity to buy a second property at the end of some obscure route. It was all part of the 'cause and effect' spiral of the boom in the last 10 years. Empty planes actually do nothing to help reduce carbon emissions but they do impact the economy as airlines like Alitalia, already a perrenial flirter with bankruptcy, may well have to start reducing flights if they cannot fill enough seats to make money. While this may be a welcome relief to those who are concerned with carbon emissions, it does mean the economy must be suffering all round.

Still, if I get another line of seats to myself on the way back, I shan't be complaining.