Stall Pusher writes:
Obviously premium loads must be standing up quite well, otherwise the same measures would have been adopted again.
Actually further steps have been taken!
When was the last time you were on a BA aircraft Stall Pusher? (Too much time on the internet in the BASSA office me thinks when you should be seeing the realities of the 'coal face'!)
The previously empty premium cabins are now full...with invol upgrades. Last flight I operated (two days ago) 51 overbooked, every seat in the 777 taken, only 4 of the premium cabin being full fare pax. A previously unheard of 'diluting of the product'!!! How many of the full fare WT and WTP pax had paid knock down fares? Most. 4 days before we left the flight was wide open with reduced fares available.
Bums on seats and open cabins is no indication of yield.
Those prices will not keep us in the manner we are accustomed, flight crew or cabin crew (or anyone else in the company for that matter). Looking at the projections from our main prem customers they see no improvement in their premium travel budgets until around 2016 not 2011.
Waking up and sniffing coffee is too late and clearly never going to be enough for (what seems to be) a very vocal but significant minority who do not have the independence of thought to look beyond BASSA's preaching and see the chasm at the end of the path which they are being led down.
However BA got to this position is now irrelevant. Who led us here is immaterial, whether the management should have pre-empted this situation of no bearing.
We are where we are. It is now about how thinly we can can spread our weight to avoid sinking in the quicksand. Do you want to live and crawl out of the other side without anything but the shirt on your back, but still survive OR take the BASSA line and stand to attention in full dress uniform applying the final touches to your hair as the sand passes up over your eyes.
The choice is not BASSA's, but for a fully informed membership to take. If the vast majority of fantastic people who make up BA CC are taken to a strike to later find out the reality of the half truths and propaganda they have been fed to meet the unions and not their best interests it will be an end to BASSA anyway.