BA-digital marketing

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        In 1993 British Airways (BA), had the monopoly of the UK airline market. According to James E.,  Ozbek S., Bamford J., Boulter E. and Bement M., with 241 aircraft servicing 165 routes across the globe and annual profits exceed £300 million, “the company seemed unassailable”. At that time Virgin Atlantic was just dust. However the UK recession of the early '90s brought turbulent times. That year BA made a loss while Virgin Atlantic grew, standing head to head with BA in UK customer perceptions.

In 2008, according to Euromonitor British Airways (BA) is market leader. With 38% of value sales, BA beats Virgin Atlantic (2nd with 18%) and Easyjet (3rd with 12.5%). However according to Financial Times we are crossing “very difficult trading conditions”, the proof lays on  BA’s operating profit that for the first 9 months had fallen 88% (£744m to £89m). Passenger traffic had fallen by 1.3% including - 13.7% decrease in premium traffic (airline's most lucrative customers). However there was a 1.4% rise in non-premium traffic.

In the light of this information it is important that BA keeps their competitiveness to maintain the leadership. So and according to OnAir1 in 24th of January of 2009, BA announced OnAir’s in-flight mobile communications service plan (business-class route from London City to New York City’s).  The system will only allow business class passengers to receive and make phone calls, texting messages and access internet during the flights. However, last year, a Telegraph Travel petition (for comments, see appendix 2) attracted about 7,000 signatures, with readers expressing concerns over safety and security and unease at the prospect of listening to other passengers’ conversations at 30,000 feet. But despite such fears, the move to introduce the technology has seemed unstoppable. A reason for such lays behind the fact that SURVEYS are CONSISTENTLY revealing that more than 90% of commercial air passengers travel with a mobile phone and/or PDA (EBSCO database). Which represents a wide market.

Analyzing the Telegraph Travel petition and the benefits of the OnAir for BA, I believed that BA will face consequences. To prove my point I carry out a quantitive marketing research (appendix 1), conducted using an online survey (snowball). The individuals were selected at random from my email list. I manage to get a sample of 79 individuals. Men and women in main age sectors up to 20’s to 50+. Both men and women working full-time or part time.

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Just like I imagine respondents didn’t like the idea of phone calls on air. The results of the survey showed that pricing is as important factor for the respondents. However, paying for internet at any rate is acceptable. Maybe because a staggering number of 42 people spend more than 5hours per day on the internet. This is the opportunity to differentiate BA from every other airline; I recommend the Wi-Fi service for business and economy class. Regarding phone calls and SMS’s I strongly agree that the service should be abandoned, once consumers start to be annoyed by having to endure phone calls ...

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