British airways

Yesterday

Mark Palmer

Farewell to the final phone-free haven

Shortly before Christmas, I visited Australia for the first time. It’s quite some journey but I was fortunate enough to fly business class with Cathay Pacific – and very plush it was, too. On the first leg to Hong Kong (a mere 12 hours or so), I was just settling into my pod (they don’t call them seats) and was about to nod off when there was something of an altercation across the aisle. ‘I understood that wi-fi would be available for the entire journey,’ said a grumpy middle-aged man, who looked like he was from the Middle East. He might well have owned much of the Middle East for

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

In defence of BA’s new loyalty scheme

One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’ People who have learned to play a game by one set of rules are bitterly affronted when the rules change Because we must consort with strangers for several hours, planes and airports amplify the normal human sensitivity to status. And so the media furore created by British Airways in revising the status thresholds for its loyalty programme is valuable

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

In defence of Amazon

We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about that? Nothing — except that the loss reflects a write-down of the value of oil and gas assets that shifts the company to a more realistic footing for an extended period of low oil prices and reduced demand, indicating resilience rather than impending doom. In recent times, BP has lived through Deepwater Horizon, history’s most politicised oil-rig disaster, and extricated itself from TNK-BP, history’s nastiest Russian joint-venture. It operated when oil was below $20 a barrel in 2001 and when it hit $147 in 2008. It has plans to achieve

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Now is not the time to throw money at airlines

British Airways warns of 12,000 redundancies. Ryanair announces 3,000 job losses as ‘a minimum to survive the next 12 months’; Virgin Atlantic adds 3,000 more. The aero engine makers Rolls-Royce and GE talk of more than 20,000 job losses between them. Of all the sectors hard hit by pandemic, aviation is one whose prospects look blighted as far as the horizon. What should governments do about it? Global trade will return to pre-crisis levels, but business travel may never do so: why would companies bear the risk and expense when video-conferencing is so cheap and efficient? Even if vaccines against Covid-19 are available by next year, international travel will be