Ba Lcy-jfk

[Brian_W]

Is there any news on how well this service is doing ?

I notice that this route is excluded from the all cabin sale - any
chance of any discounts coming soon on this route ?

[PAXboy]

Since it is designed to be a high premium service, my guess is that the only discounts will be those handed out personally to gold customers to get them to try it. They are broke and, apart from launch promotion, this will be kept exclusive, like First and Club used to be. As I say, just a wild uninformed guess.

[raffele]

With the City essentially funding the service, no need for discounts for us Joe Public...

[Blink182]

Just go over to ba.com and put in the route and dates....... see how much the fare is and whether seats are available........ should tell you how the route is doing

[Cyrano]

Originally Posted by Blink182

Just go over to ba.com and put in the route and dates....... see how much the fare is and whether seats are available........ should tell you how the route is doing

If only life were that simple!

Doing as you suggest in this case, Blink, will tell you whether the flight is full and what public fare BA's revenue managers are choosing to offer to the market. That's all.

For a "normal" route with no significant corporate traffic and a simple monotonically-increasing pricing policy (price always increases and never falls as you approach a full aircraft or day of departure), looking at the public website will give you a rough idea of how well things are going.

But this is far from a normal route. A big chunk of the traffic is corporate so doesn't book via BA.com, but rather through its own channels at fixed rates. And BA has a lot riding on this service being seen to be a success, so (as discussed on another forum) it's been offering much easier Executive Club mileage redemption on this route, as well as apparently calling up passengers already booked to fly BA LHR-JFK and offering them free "upgrades" to LCY-JFK. Both of these will tend to fill the plane up without either pushing up the publicly available fare, or being seen to "mark down" the service or diminish its exclusivity (by including it in a conventional "sale"). Unfortunately neither offering easier mileage redemption nor transferring passengers from other BA flights really increases BA's overall revenue either!

Load factor on the route for October seems to have been somewhere around 70% overall - appreciably better eastbound than westbound, as you would expect. WW stated that their breakeven was projected as around 70%, but it would surprise me if that 70% had been calculated including all the non-rev traffic and cannibalisation of LHRJFK that's been going on.