British Airways Will Invest In A380 Interiors, Blames Mess On Ousted CEO [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • American Airlines eliminated saver and anytime awards and basically renamed ‘web specials’ as ‘flight awards’ – in other words, if you’re redeeming solely on American Airlines for travel, that’s all there is. They didn’t even reprogram the name internally and their systems still call flight awards web specials.

  • The first presidential candidate with affiliate links. They’ve long had loyalty points programs and elite status.

  • British Airways is trying to undo the mess made by ex-boss Alex Cruz and Willie Walsh before him. Too much blame on Cruz, not enough on Walsh. But the article notes that the Airbus A380 will get new Club Suites and first class.

    [Sean] Doyle won’t admit it — he’s a company man — but he is tackling the challenges by undoing as many of Cruz’s cost-cutting measures as he can, as fast as he can. The phrase he repeats throughout this interview is “rebuild from the bottom up” — he uses it to signal the scale of the task. As one of his colleagues, speaking privately, puts it: “Sean knows he inherited a house that was falling down and needs rebuilding from the foundations.”

    …Doyle has fired many of the executives he inherited from Cruz, hiring new ones from outside BA. He raided Dutch rival KLM for a new chief operating officer, René de Groot, who replaced Jason Mahoney. Dirk John, formerly of the management consultancy McKinsey and Lufthansa, has taken over from Anthony Allcock as chief information and digital officer and is driving the IT revolution. Calum Laming has replaced Tom Stevens as chief customer officer. It’s Laming’s job to make sure customer service is on par with his previous employer, Abu Dhabi’s Etihad.

  • Love this.

  • Congratulations on the milestone, Northern Pacific!

  • Virgin lets options to buy Boom Supersonic jets lapse

  • TIL: Amex Platinum gets Fast Track security at 7 Italian airports

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Good to see BA trying to recover from the debacle of Walsh and Cruz. Now if only AA and United would likewise purge their similar minded top brass…

  2. Used to get some good international flights on the AA saver awards. Not anymore.

    With all the crap that are pulling, be using up the rest of my miles to get to international jumping off point and that’s it.

  3. Sean Doyle is saying the right things and making some good changes. Hopefully we’ll see improvements at BA soon.

  4. They can start by replacing the business class herringbone seats in the 380. The first-class suites are fine – i dont see a reason to replace them.

  5. BA needs to urgently complete the upgrading of all of their 777 and their 787 aircraft to Club Suites before they embark on anything else. It’s taking forever and it’s unacceptable for passengers to expect their flight to have Club suites and instead land up on an aircraft with the awful herringbone configuration where you have to climb over the adjacent passenger.

  6. I hazard a guess that those mentioning “herringbone” are referring to the old Club World “ying-yang” forward/backward 8 across dormitories.
    “Herringbone” configs usually will give direct aisle access.
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