Brunchgate: How many flyers are impacted by BA’s morning and evening meal changes?

Our articles on the new British Airways long-haul brunch and late evening meal changes this week caused a lot of discussion.

Oliver Ranson of Airline Revenue Economics produced an interesting analysis on the changes for his Substack newsletter and I thought it would benefit from a wider audience.

You can see other articles by Oliver, and sign up to receive Oliver’s future articles by email, here. Click ‘No thanks’ on that page to bypass the sign-up page if you just want to read his other content.

We have edited this article slightly from its original format and any errors or typos may be ours. Over to Oliver ….

As HfP covered this week, British Airways is now offering a brunch service on longhaul flights leaving before 11.29am. The menus look bonkers. As the HfP article showed, you will get:

• a starter, like smoked salmon, soup or artichoke

• a breakfast course like waffles or sausage, mushrooms and hash browns

• chocolate cake, coffee and liqueurs

You can wash your breakfast down with a nice glass of red or white wine if you wish.

As well as the rather strange menu choices, BA has decided that any flight scheduled to leave before 11.29am will get this brunch menu. This choice looks far too late.

To see why, consider Monday’s BA255 flight to Bridgetown, Barbados. Scheduled to depart at 11.25am, this flight will have featured brunch. Operated by Boeing 787-10 G-ZBLG, the flight left more or less on time and was airborne by 11.45am.

It will take the crew about an hour to get everything ready for the service. So passengers will start to eat around 12.45pm. This is time for the full lunch, not brunch. If the flight had been delayed, which is not unusual at Heathrow, passengers would be eating their waffles or sausages at 1pm, 2pm or later.

For the many passengers connecting from Europe, which is generally one hour ahead of London, the brunch service is even less suitable.

Why has British Airways chosen this model?

Why has BA chosen this bizarre model? Obviously it is down to cost control. But why is the cutover point at 11.29am? I have reverse-engineered their decision, looking at outbound flights from Heathrow.

For simplicity, I have ignored inbound flights and long-haul flights from Gatwick.

Departures leaving before 10.00am might be suitable candidates for brunch. Unfortunately BA simply does not have many long-haul flights leaving that early.

I took the airline’s schedule for 6th November from OAG Schedule Analyser and identified all the long-haul flights departing from Heathrow.

The table below shows that only 1% to 2% of the airline’s long-haul First, Club World and World Traveller Plus (premium economy) capacity departs before 9.00am. In fact, there is just one flight – the early departure to New York JFK.

As you can see, just 14% of First seats and 11.8% of Club World and World Traveller Plus seats are scheduled to leave before 10am.

However, 25% of First seats and 20.7% of Club World and World Traveller Plus seats leave before the 11.29am cut-off.

BA’s reasoning is now arguably clear. A business case to save money by serving brunch was proposed, and management has pushed the service time back until the savings looked good enough. 20% of passengers was their magic number.

At the other end of the day BA is cutting costs too. It is only offering a light meal on flights that leave after 9.00pm. The table compiled from OAG data shows that this change affects 10.5% of First passengers and 12.2% of Club World and World Traveller Plus travellers.

Together, the cost cutting is expected to impact almost exactly one third of premium cabin travellers flying from Heathrow.

A beautiful number like one third is too much of a co-incidence for me to ignore. This feels like a service change designed by accountants.

Which routes are impacted by these changes?

Choice – in terms of your ability to choose an alternative BA departure with a full meal service – will be eliminated on nine out of 56 long-haul routes on the sample date I looked at.

Six routes will be brunch only: Dallas Fort Worth, Tokyo Haneda, Houston, Lagos, Nassau and Nairobi. On my sample date there are no alternative departures to these cities with a full meal service.

Three routes are only scheduled at times with the late light meal: Abuja, Abu Dhabi and Santiago. Again, on the date I picked there was no alternative BA flight available.

Nine routes will have a choice of brunch or a full meal service depending on which flight you pick. These are Bridgetown, Mumbai, Boston, Delhi, New York Newark, New York JFK, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.

Four routes will have a choice of a late light meal or a full meal service depending on which flight you pick. These are Cape Town, Dubai, Johannesburg and Singapore.

All remaining long haul routes fall exclusively into the noon to 9pm window where a standard full meal will be offered.

(Remember that I have looked at one day only. Some routes like Tokyo Haneda have multiple flights on certain days of the week.)

Things might not be so bad on short flights like Abuja and Abu Dhabi. Nairobi will be a disaster as the flight leaves early-ish at 9.45am but due to the long 8:50 flying time and late 9.35pm arrival it completely fills the day. Passengers will want more than a poached egg on toast.

I would hope that the ultra-long flights to Santiago, Singapore and South Africa are fully catered but I will not be surprised if they are not. [HfP edit – we understand that South Africa flights ARE impacted by the reduced catering.]

Overall, I expect the new brunch menu to be a disaster and it will hopefully be a matter of months before BA cancels it. It is not without form here. When a complex trolley based service was introduced in 2018 (image below) it took hours for the service to complete and the idea was terminated quickly.

Technology is meant to bring us fully personalised airline services

The prognosis for modern airline retailing is terrible. Consider these two conclusions:

• The 11.29am cut-off point and the resulting optimistic-case 12.45pm service delivery time shows that BA decision-makers either do not understand or do not think through what the service will actually be like in practice

• The fact that exactly one-third of passengers are impacted shows that service changes are probably designed by or for accountants, not the travelling public

When BA is taking decisions like this, how are they supposed to operate effectively in an offer-order retailing environment?

(HfP edit: ‘offer-order’ is the technical term for the move to fully personalised airline retailing. In theory ba.com would learn from your travel history and intelligently suggest relevant flights and non-flight ancilliaries during the booking flow. Whilst this sounds pretty basic, it is still a big step forward from the current position where airlines still email me asking if I need a hotel in London, despite my trip originally starting here and my loyalty account having a London address on it.)

The standard industry response would be to say that offer-order will be entirely driven by algorithms so it will all be OK. Some people would even say that a simply bad product like BA’s brunch service would not be designed in the offer-order world because data would show passengers would not want it. This misses the point.

Algorithms are designed and monitored according to the priorities of their human controllers. When these priorities are messed up, as the case of brunch shows they will be, the algorithms will simply not work.

Offer-order is seen by airlines mainly as a technical challenge. When it comes to the technical matters I am sure that British Airways’ solutions will be second to none. After all, they have the might of travel IT giant Amadeus behind them. Since they are an Amadeus “driver customer” it is fair to say that what goes down at British Airways will influence the industry.

Unfortunately the case of brunch suggests that the future of offer-order at British Airways may be a disaster because they do not understand what their passengers want. Since BA’s approach to the technology will influence almost every other airline, the future of airline retailing looks dismal for all passengers.

There is a simple solution. Airlines need to train their staff to think like passengers.

Managers should fly several times a year as commercial passengers. They should pay on their own credit card and reclaim expenses like millions of business travellers do.

Unfortunately we all know this will not happen. To fly. To starve.

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