Manattheback
Apologies for getting your handle wrong - mea culpa!
A complicating issue is the positioning of the legacy airlines.
To expand, there are 3 generic business strategies....
1 - Low cost, as embodied by Ryanair
2- Focus on a sector, e.g. BA, AF et al
3 - Differentiated, e.g. Fractional ownership
The issue is that airlines in sector 2 then complicate matters by having premium classes and short and long haul services.
In reality, short haul is a low cost market, where the majority of pax have made it very clear by their buying patterns that they are happy with a basic service, so that's the busihess driver.
But there is a premium market segment that they try to cater for too.
On long haul, where firms like BA are truly low cost in Y, there is a very strong premium segment, so schemes like the Executive Club exist to try and keep market share.
This creates a problem of mixed messages for the legacy airlines, that the locos don't have.
A saner solution would be to revert to BEA and BOAC and treat short and long haul as being completely different products and in the long term, it seems to me that this is where are heading.
But companies like BA have all kinds of legacy agreements in place that constrain this, no doubt that was why Go was started as a greenfield op.
So we, the pax, experience mixed messages and services.