British Airways hasn’t been ‘the world’s favourite airline’ for ages

Are you reading this in the departure lounge, en route to an Easter break? If like me you’ve chosen to fly with Ryanair, I suspect you will judge the experience by the ease of airport parking, the length of the security queue and whether they play that fanfare signalling ‘another on-time arrival’. Anything approaching decent cabin service will come as a bonus: you’ll hear things like ‘Gosh, these girls work hard considering they’re paid next to nothing’ or ‘Actually, this lasagne’s not bad for a fiver.’ Four years into a marketing programme called Always Getting Better, supposedly about being nicer to customers, the genius of the Ryanair model is that we still don’t expect pleasantness so long as we get cheapness and punctuality — and we laugh at the chutzpah of chief executive Michael O’Leary when we read headlines like ‘Ryanair threatens to double passenger fee for babies’.

Compare all this with British Airways, which long since ceased to be ‘the world’s favourite airline’, but resisted the no-frills revolution by continuing to present itself as a paragon of customer care, maintaining a slightly camp Home Counties tone to its cabin service that can feel 30 years out of date.