British Airways pins hopes on family ties and premium leisure passengers for summer rebound

British Airways will be a smaller airline for the next few years, its new chief executive has confirmed.

Sean Doyle said BA would not return to its pre-pandemic scale for some time.

“It will take demand two or three years to get back to where it was in 2019,” he said. “Our best guess is 2023-24.”

Mr Doyle, 49, was speaking five months to the day after he took over as CEO at BA from Alex Cruz.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, BA has lost hundreds of millions of pounds and shed around 10,000 staff.

“It’s been a very tough year, but we are really looking forward to doing what we love doing which is getting back in the air and looking after customers,” Mr Doyle said.

The chief executive believes the rollout of vaccines in the UK “would leave a lot of room for optimism that we can be back up and running by the summer”.

The recovery will be fuelled by strong demand from people keen to visit friends and family, as well as “premium leisure” passengers.

Mr Doyle said he expected that the government’s promised “recovery roadmap” for aviation would be announced on, not after, 12 April.

“The industry does need certainty. We’ve got planning windows which run into months not weeks.”

He declined to say what proportion of its 2019 scheduled operation would operate this summer.

“To be frank, we need to find out on 12 April the sort of framework we’re operating with,” he said.

At present all leisure travel within and beyond the UK is illegal. The prime minister has said that international journeys may be possible from 17 May.

“The amount of bookings we have seen for travel after 17 May is much, much higher than before,” Mr Doyle said.

“The public is anticipating that mid-May is when they can start planning to go back into the skies again.

“The first segment keen to get going is people visiting friends and relatives.

“Many people have been separated from their family and their loved ones over the course of the last 12 months. That is a segment we see very keen and able to travel.

“Second is leisure. People do want to look forward to a holiday. And we have seen both our long and short-haul destinations really drive some big bookings as we head into summer.

“It’s also pretty obvious that countries and governments want to see British tourists again.”

He predicted that last summer’s very short notice changes in travel restrictions, which saw British holidaymakers in Spain suddenly made subject to two weeks of quarantine on their return, would not return in 2021.

Mr Doyle previously filled the same role at Aer Lingus, a sister airline to British Airways in the IAG group.

He said: “The pandemic has thrown up many opportunities to come out the other end of this as a better business – driven by the use of technology and insight.”

The UK needs to build on its lead established in its vaccine programme, Mr Doyle said. 

“With Britain’s progress on vaccination, it can now put a marker down on reenabling travel. We can be ambitious.

“People who’ve been vaccinated should be able to travel without restriction. Those who have not been vaccinated should be able to travel with a negative test.”

Yet besides the controversy over ethical and privacy aspects of a vaccine passport, there is no international agreement on verification of immunisation, negative tests or recovery from Covid-19.

The British Airways chief executive said the airline was working with multiple partners to develop digital systems that would smooth the process of travel.

British Airways has historically been highly dependent on Club World and First passengers, most of them flying on business, for a large slice of its profits.

But BA’s chief executive said business travel will lag behind the other two market segments: visiting friends and family, and leisure flying.

“There will be a couple of trigger points for business travel to come back,” he said. “One is when people get back in the office and two, again when they’re able to travel in and start doing a bit of face-to-face again.

“We are seeing surveys from a lot of corporate customers that are showing a degree of fatigue with homeworking and remote working.

“You do business with people, not organisations, and the ability to get face-to-face again will come back and will be part of the way people want to operate in the future.”

The airline has retired its entire fleet of Boeing 747 aircraft; previously it was the world’s biggest operator of the jumbo jet.

It is replacing some of them with much more modern and more efficient twin-jets, notably the Airbus A350.

The entire British Airways fleet of 12 Airbus A380 “SuperJumbo” planes is currently grounded, but Mr Doyle said it would return to long-haul flying. 

“The A380 isn’t flying at the minute but it is in our plans for the future rebuild of the airline,” he said. “Exactly when we will put the A380 back into service is something that we’re not clear on.”

Mr Doyle’s predecessor, Alex Cruz, ended the long-standing tradition of complimentary snacks in short-haul economy. But free snacks and water were brought back in the summer of 2020 to minimise the amount of contact between passengers and cabin crew.

The new chief executive said the complimentary offering would remain, but that it would be augmented with a pre-order capability.

BA’s summer network is very different from the pre-2020 pattern, with many more Mediterranean destinations – including a dozen airports in Greece served from Heathrow, an unprecedented number.

“We will be looking at new dots on the map,” Sean Doyle said.

Previously unserved locations in Europe and Asia will be considered.

“We’re looking at new destinations both across long haul and short haul. We’ll be led by our customers on where we fly.”