Working Nine To One

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, is a perennial target of mine but, in fairness, he makes that easy.

I have described BA as a strategically lost company before and there has never been a worse moment for what was once the 'World's Favourite Airline'. It is being squeezed by low budget airlines at one end who consistently out perform expectations in terms of profit and by higher service airlines at the other end who focus on their niche market and make enough to survive. BA's two major 'strategic' moves in the last year have been to make a series of reactionary, 'knee jerk' slashes of its costs, with no real impact or direction, and then make arguably its biggest blunder, to buy another airline in the same strategic 'no man's land', Iberian.

In all of this, the backbone of the company has stuck with Walsh until yesterday when the staff who man the airlines voted nine to one in favour of a strike action, to leave the course of action in the hands of the union, Unite. Walsh seemed to suicidally want to fight his staff, having asked them to make sacrifice after sacrifice to the point when they finally made their stand over the 'dumbing down' of their roles. The company now faces a 12 day period of strike action over one of the busiest travel times of the year - Christmas. It could not have been a worse result for BA - it could not have been a more stupid move by management.

The recent BA history is a litany of business cock ups. Terminal 5's opening was about as inspiring as it got as a superb terminal was project managed in a schoolboy fashion, stress testing the unprepared systems with hordes of real passengers. Then we had the series of staff cost cuts that played with the fantastic loyalty of the staff only to shaft them by trashing their worth in the latest move. In between were two attempts to buy a dying airline in Spain, the first ending in farce as BA's market worth fell below that of their target at the crucial moment, and the launch of a business class only airline out of the City Airport with a capacity of just 32 seats which pandered to the whims of rich bankers when two similar services to the US had failed less than a year earlier.

The message in that service alone could not have been worse to staff, the shareholders and the public - BA was prepared to service rich bankers ahead of paying its staff with a service already proven to be unprofitable by two other companies.

I don't know what the shareholders think of Walsh as they seem to support him grimly, but we now know what the stakeholders think. The once highly vaunted air crews of the once great airline have voted categorically to fight him - and you know instinctively that he has lost his best weapon to survive because he has undervalued and disrespected it.

It's not as if you could not see this coming. It has been a quick process of losing the confidence of the staff and laying a scene for the battle. Walsh calls the action of the union 'cynical' but that's what you get when you lose the support of your staff. From a union's point of view there is no point striking when the airline does not fly - their tactics are generally to hit you were it hurts most as it quickly sparks negotiation, at a battlefield very much with the terrain in their favour. There are no surprises that this is exactly what has happened and it was about as obvious as the cock up at Terminal 5 as it all unravelled.

BA seems to be managed by fools. The strike action is not at all helpful. We can see the Royal Mail happening all over again with the one tragic ingredient for Walsh - the customers do have a choice. There are other airlines to fly - in fact, to Walsh's edification, the skies and airports are full of them. His strategic plan has been a series of schoolboy responses to a business game exercise.

I would say that BA needs a rapid change at the top to survive.

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.

What is The Point of Airmiles?

I have over the years, off and on, saved airmiles - the BA focused customer loyalty scheme. I have tens of thousands of the things. Yet, it is only when you actually try to do something with them that you realise they really are pretty useless.

This year I have travelled a lot on BA through work, and the odd bit of leisure. For a while I made a conscious effort to stick with them as I thought travel would be a lot easier through Terminal 5 and I would indeed build up airmiles that might get me to a Silver Card or I could use them on a holiday. I have must admit that I have travelled enough this year to become an expert on every terminal except four and most European airports. I can say that Terminal 5 is pretty good - it's very accessible from the M25 if you can avoid the roadworks, there's plenty of room at setdown, a good carpark and there are reasonable bus routes serving it if you don't mind endless stops. Trains are fine if you are coming from London - other than that, then forget it.

Quite big things let it down. Staff shortage is the first. That is at both security check in and passport control. It's like being a local Budgens - they wait until the queues are so long that people are snaking all over the place and back into the terminal before they even consider opening up a second or third machine and there are always ones not being used. Meanwhile at passport control it's just an ugly mess and a big scrum - in fact, at every terminal. It's a real shame after so much money and effort when into it. Going through any airport in Germany you simply do not get those sorts of queues or daft bottlenecks, there are always plenty of machines or stalls open and loads of staff. The throughput is much faster too and that has nothing to do with the severity of checks, it is simply staff more interested in getting the queues down and more of them.

Enough of those gripes - back to blinking airmiles. I read with some eagerness that BA has opened a direct route to Las Vegas and next year for my brother-in-law's 40th birthday we are going there. The big problem I have found with airmiles is that they are not a real 'currency'. For instance, if you want to upgrade to Club Europe, it's the same airmiles for an hour's trip as a long haul upgrade. Dumb. The second thing is, it's actually quite hard to spend them. We are one of those families who have to grab time when we can and even if we could plan a trip, we would usually buy a package holiday of some sort. So airmiles would be handy for grabbing those trips of whim. But there is fat chance of you getting the dates you want.

It is a Ryan Air approach that says that one type of traveller only gets cheap fares, all others pay accordingly and expensively for their needs. BA airmiles are the same - unless you are flexible to an amazing degree, it's highly unlikely you will get a flight to suit. And this is not just on one occasion - my airmiles have not been spent for nearly 3 years and yet I try regularly to get flights with them.

So Vegas next June sounded ideal. I now had dates a year ahead, could be flexible by about 3 days and I needed hotels too. Wallop. I could possibly get a flight 10 days after the dates needed and then coming back would mean nearly a fortnight stay which was not ideal for a planned 4 night trip. I didn't even get to investigating a hotel.

I then made the mistake of phoning the Executive Club to see if there was a mistake. Nope. No airmiles seats were available for that flight any time around the dates. The phoneperson said that it was a very busy route - so busy it has yet to start flying, I mentioned. Ah, there had been high demand. Right, that's why I could buy the tickets by the bucket load from any website including BA's, I suppose. Ah, said the person, there are only a few airmiles seats allocated to each flight and therefore they sell out early. Given the route has yet to launch and was only just featured in HighLife Magazine, that was pretty quick indeed. In answer to my question, why are the airmiles seats limited to so few, the person said that they had to make a profit.

At this point I did not hold my peace. I asserted that the whole point of a customer loyalty scheme is that customers already have paid for tickets upon which BA accrues a certain amount of profit which is set aside to pay for these future flights. I can see the point of trying to limit them but by making the number so low, and therefore the scheme so inflexible, people like me would get exasperated and therefore think the scheme is valueless. Put simply, if you cannot redeem the airmiles, then they are worthless. Just to make matters worse, when I tried to use them for the same dates on non-direct routes and via partner airlines, the same answer came up.

So out of sheer morbid interest, I looked at several websites and airlines, every one of them was cheaper for direct and indirect routes to Las Vegas. In the end, we looked at two great deals via Air France and Virgin that got us 4 nights at the Bellagio Hotel and the whole package was cheaper than an indirect flight with a BA partner, using mostly airmiles to pay for the flights and having to fly over week later. Just to be clear, as Robert Peston would say, it was more expensive using a customer loyalty program and less flexible than the alternatives, one of which was a direct flight.

I could have commented that BA is losing shed loads of money and it is simply driving customers away as, frankly speaking, if I can avoid BA in the future, I will. The rules on accruing Tier Points are stupid and Virgin does not have such a stupid and complex scheme nor do most other airlines. Finally, all the others, in my experience, fall over backwards to help you spend the loyalty points.

After all, that is the entire point of the scheme. Perhaps it may dawn on BA management that if their loyalty scheme is not incentivising loyalty then they are giving away money for no reason to fund it. However, if they give the profit away in the spirit of customer retention, do not make it difficult to redeem the points.

It's pretty simple really. Vegas here we come - and not via BA.

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.

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.