BA loses. Time to stick to brand principles

News today that British Airways has again lost cash in their first half results, a whole £292 million pounds of loss. Strikes us that it all once again comes down to customer service and more importantly sticking to brand credentials that made you so successful in the first place. There was a time in the not so distant past that flying BA was a pleasurable experience, one that, dare I say it, actually made the whole process of flying just a little more bearable. Yet with the advent of the low cost carriers such as EasyJet and RyanAir, carriers such as BA began a terrible race to the bottom in order to compete on every level. Now while many passengers on BA may have saved £30 on a short haul flight, they lost all the benefits in the process. A drop in quality on every level, on areas such as food, staff, timings etc is HUGE. From a brand perspective, people began to question why they were bothering, the brand became slowly tainted, losing travellers again and again. Why pay more for the same rubbish you get on RyanAir...

Crap, low rent flights, with overpriced food, plastered with advertising, where you get charged for looking in the wrong direction are the domain of RyanAir et al. They have no interest in service and strangely travellers don't care, because it's cheap bus travel with wings. The brand has never represented anything else, so therefore people aren't disappointed...

There is nothing worse for a consumer than a brand that makes a promise and never keeps it... BA made a promise that their quality would remain high, while their costs were reduced - clearly a promise that could never be kept. The result is their in a terrible limbo between trying to keep up with RyanAir and trying to remain the once great airline they were. But if they focus on this race for the bottom, then RyanAir are always going to win.

Focus on quality, keep the customer happy, stick to your core brand principles, I think we'd all be amazed by how many people come back. Let RyanAir run the cattlesheds...