British Airways is beefing up its brand by offering an attractive slate of new products and services to its flyers during a special promotion.
The airline, which dominated the London Nassau route for many years, recently had to swallow sharing the market with Virgin Atlantic which began offering direct routes between Nassau and London nearly six months ago. The speculation is that Virgin has forced British’s hand to spruce up its image.
Under the promotion that runs until tomorrow, travellers have the opportunity to fly round-trip on British at a reduced rate of $999 – a rate the airline said was slashed by 50 per cent from the regular fare. This includes the luxury of experiencing the airline’s World Traveller Plus economy cabin.
According to a press release from the company, “The totally separate cabin offers a 38-inch seat pitch- seven inches more than World Traveller, our economy service. The seats are wider, feature more recline and give additional space to enjoy 18 channels of entertainment on the seat-back video screen,” said Diane Corrie, Commercial Manager for the North Caribbean.
The seats, designed by German race car seat designer Recaro, also have built-in power ports to facilitate laptop use.
In addition, “other benefits of World Traveller Plus are priority meal service and double-weight hand-luggage allowance”.
Improvements have also been made to the airline’s Club World cabin geared more for business travellers at a cost of over 200 pounds. “The new Club World cabin was designed as a ‘lounge in the sky’ for business passengers, to allow them to sleep, work or relax at 35,000 feet,” said a press release.
All improvements involved “extensive” customer research, including “sleep studies with ergonomic experts,” which included Royal Air Force and NASA experts.
During the special promotion, flyers have the opportunity to rack up extra frequent-flyer miles. “British Airways is offering…frequent flyer miles for new and existing Executive Club members who fly transatlantic in First class or Club World during the airline’s bonus mile promotion,” according to the press release.
Caribbean Executive Club members, including those in The Bahamas, can accumulate enough frequent-flyer miles to earn free round-trip tickets to fly economy on British American’s partner airlines, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
“Fifty thousand miles is enough to earn two domestic tickets between any two points within the continental US and Canada…or one free economy ticket to the UK or select European destinations on British Airways,” according to information in the press release.
Oliver King, Area Commercial Manager of the airline, said in the press statement, “There aren’t enough superlatives to describe this promotion. We want it to be over the top.”
British Airlines and it partner airlines fly to over 650 destinations throughout the world and is the world’s largest passenger airline. British Airline owns a fleet of 293 aircraft and offers five non-stop flights between Nassau and London per week.
By: BARRY WILLIAMS, The Nassau Guardian
