It’s curious when an airline combines a set of passenger experience updates together as a package, especially when some of the elements of the package would otherwise be newsworthy on their own. Why, might a media-savvy observer ask, get one media cycle out of a dozen pieces of news rather than a dozen media cycles, or even six or seven combined cycles? 

So it is with British Airways’ “In the Skies” series of announcements, which apparently include 600+ “modernisation initiatives” that comprise a new website/app, a free wifi messaging tier, operational technology upgrades, 350 new customer experience jobs at Heathrow, GBP 750m in IT infrastructure, a new lounge design concept, new shorthaul cabins, the announcement of a forthcoming new First Class, a new route, a returning route, and its biggest sustainable aviation fuel purchase to date.

Perhaps the most relevant is the new shorthaul cabins, or at least the seats towards the front of the hybrid cabin A320 family fleet that are in the flexible Club Europe business class zone. BA is replacing its previous Collins Pinnacle with a new seat from Collins Aerospace, which the seatmaker confirms to Runway Girl Network is its well-received Meridian product.

Meridian is by no means a new seat — it was publicly unveiled by the then-Rockwell Collins at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in 2018, and circulated under wraps well before then, and indeed Collins was showing an updated Meridian+ at AIX in 2023 — but it is a substantial functional, nose-to-tail upgrade from the existing Pinnacle. 

BA’s custom side table in Club Europe’s blocked middle seat returns, although in personal preference your author would prefer it not to: it doesn’t really add much useful function since the middle tray table is available for use, it makes the seat underneath a crumb/grime zone very visible to passengers yet apparently invisible to cleaning crews, and its position risks elbowing a drink over the other person in the row. 

Aesthetically, the seat looks to be a similar deep charcoal-blue-black colour to the existing product, but with a red ring around the headrest. It’s fine, but samey in the context of BA’s main competitors including Air France and Delta, both of whom use the deep-blue-with-red-accent colourway.

The seat cover features a herringbone-arrow motif that your author reckons says “Delta Air Lines” more than anything else. In fairness to BA, something similar to this herringbone has been an element of the BA soft product brand package before — in the 2019 John Horsfall premium cabin blankets and cushions, its 2019 premium economy amenity kit and blanket and its 2020 economy pillows and blankets — but it’s not a core part of the brand.

It seems there are two likely possibilities here. First, that this is an application of five-year-old vaguely related brand elements, delayed by the interiors supply chain issues plaguing the industry. If so, fair enough, everyone’s struggling. The second option is that this is the first implementation of a new, updated brand element. If so, it seems unwise to hew so closely to a CMF palette that Delta has successfully established as its own and that is so close to Air France in the European market.

Elsewhere, passengers should expect extra-large bins for carryons. The new short-haul seats and cabin interiors “will feature on the next generation of British Airways’ Airbus A320neo and A321neos, with eight aircraft set to arrive from May this year”, says BA.

AC sockets, meanwhile, seem to be out for the entire aircraft, replaced by USB sockets. Club Europe comes with higher power charging than down the back: BA says that the Club seats get “USB-A & USB-C power (60W) backrest-mounted charging ports” while economy gets just 15W. Given the constraints of inflight power, it’s not entirely clear how that will split between the USB-A and -C, and indeed whether each row of business has the ability to serve 180W of power across the three rows. (The presumption, based on aircraft architecture, would be ‘no’.)

The removal of AC sockets from the equation may turn out to be unwise from a robustness and reliability point of view. The information security wisdom of plugging data-capable USB cables into unknown sockets aside, both USB-A and -C ports are well known to be fragile when exposed to frequent use, and particularly prone to the “tongue” in the middle of the port bending, snapping or otherwise failing. AC, by contrast, is relatively robust and reliable.

Starting on 3 April and rolling out to the fleet over the following two weeks, British Airways’ own Executive Club frequent flyers will be entitled to a free messaging tier over the airline’s inflight connectivity. The carrier says the tier will be available “on all BA connected aircraft for the full duration of the flight on a single device”.

While this is still behind much of the competition — where business class passengers and high-tier frequent flyers are often provided with complimentary streaming tier access — it will be interesting to see whether this change also makes an improvement to the likely capped intra-European connectivity via the now-Viasat/Deutsche Telekom EAN.

As for the rest of the announcement, a new website and app is in testing, not before time. This has been a major point of passenger friction in recent years, and not just when the airline is having an IT meltdown.

There’s also a new lounge design concept, rolling out first in Dubai later this year, as well as an operational improvement announcement that ticks all the buzzword boxes of “machine learning, automation and AI”, adds new tugs and tow equipment, and 350 new ground staffers at Heathrow. A

ll in all, it’s curious why BA chose to bury all these very welcome operational and passenger experience improvements beneath the inevitable headlines of new Eurobusiness seats and free messaging.

Related Articles:

• Come dine with me at BA’s Heathrow T3 First Class lounge
• Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss tap EAN connectivity for 150+ narrowbodies
• Airbus sounds the death knell for pivot bins on single-aisle jets
• Once an EAN adversary, Viasat cements commitment to hybrid network
• Aegean’s new business class: well above Eurobusiness average
• How to elevate the Eurobiz concept beyond the cocktail table
• A tale of two classes: British Airways World Traveller and WTP

Featured image credited to British Airways