BA has dipped into its marketing artillery
and launched a PR assault on low-cost
airlines. Photograph: Tim Ockenden/PA
Don't be too overwhelmed by the fanfare surrounding BA's announcement of its "radical" shake-up of short-haul fares today. In truth, not a great deal has changed.
Let's examine the top-line claim: "One-way all-inclusive tickets starting at just £29." Great. Unless you're paying with a credit card, in which case you can add an extra £3 per transaction. You might also recall that BA's recent campaign advertised various short-haul returns from £59. A £1 cut in the lowest return fare is welcome, but hardly headline news.
The next promise also sounds generous. "All non-changeable economy tickets will be scrapped, with air travellers able to change their flights, no matter what they have paid for the ticket, up to midnight the day before departure." They will indeed - but for a fee of £30 "per transaction", according to an editor's note at the end of the press release. In fact, this is not per transaction at all, as a call to BA's press office confirms. If you book return tickets for a family of four and pay for them together, you'll pay £120 to change them all.
In any case, rivals like FlyBe, Ryanair and easyJet have been allowing their customers to change their tickets online (also for a fee) for some time.
The chief difference is that BA is not charging extra for baggage, golf clubs and skis (as Ryanair now does), food (as every low-cost airline does: the one that didn't, Duo, quickly went bust) and still doesn't charge a fee for debit card transactions. Call me a cynic, but it's only online that anyone tries to charge me a fee for card payments. It's simply a way of screwing more money out of passengers at the last stage of the booking process. Given that paying cash is not an option, the practice is reprehensible.
This isn't to say that BA's announcement is unwelcome. They badly need to persuade people that they can be a cheap airline, and have not been helped by disingenuous and unscrupulous claims by their rivals - renaming isolated airports, trumpeting "free" flights and then throwing in taxes, baggage fees and transaction fees on top, for example. But it all feels rather belated - and it certainly isn't radical. Don't be fooled.
