Dear British Airways,
I saw your latest business class sale advert. Beautiful photography, tasteful fonts, the usual tasteful smattering of champagne, winglets and folded duvets. Very on brand. And yet, in a strange way, it completely misses the point.
From the ad, one can only assume the principal desire of the modern traveller is to drink, eat and lapse into a coma for the duration of the flight. Business class, in your world, appears to be a sort of flying spa day with wings. A faintly anonymous arm holding a glass, a neatly folded blanket. It’s all terribly lovely – and, frankly, almost entirely wrong.
Because there are two rather glaring problems with this approach.
The first is that you’re ignoring the single most uncomfortable part of air travel: everything that happens before the plane leaves the ground.
The queuing. The baggage roulette. The “will my cabin bag fit?” anxiety. The shouted last‑minute gate change. The family of five with twelve suitcases and a pushchair that appears to have been engineered by NASA. This is where the misery lives, and this is precisely where business class quietly shines.
A business class ticket gives you a larger baggage allowance so you’re not playing suitcase Jenga on the bedroom floor the night before. It gives you priority check‑in and boarding so you don’t have to elbow your way through a crowd that appears to have arrived three days early “just in case”. And.. perhaps the most valuable of all, it gets you into a lounge with free food, a seat you don’t have to fight for, and a level of background noise lower than that of a small war.
That’s the magic trick. Not “have a glass of bubbly in a beige leather pod”, but “we have surgically removed 70% of the stress from your journey before you even see the aircraft”. Yet your advert skips serenely over this, as if the airport were some neutral prelude rather than the seventh circle of hell.
The second problem is that you insist on marketing business class as if it were a sort of deluxe dormitory, rather than what it claims to be: a business seat.
If this is business class, where is the business?
Where is the space for a laptop that doesn’t require the flexibility of a yoga instructor to use? Where is the obvious, idiot‑proof charging for every device we now haul around like life support systems? Why can’t the laptop connect to the seat screen so we can have a proper second monitor at 38,000 feet, instead of watching our spreadsheet on a display the size of a postcard?
On a recent Qatar Airways flight I had Starlink internet access. Proper, grown‑up connectivity. I could work in real time, send large files, join calls (which I didn’t because I think calling on a plane violates every social contract we may have) and actually do my job while hurtling over the desert at Mach 0.8. That is the sort of thing that makes a finance director say, “You know what, this upgrade might actually be worth it.”
If you want companies to justify paying for business class, don’t just show them a bed and a wine glass; show them a flying office. Sell the idea that eight hours in the air can be eight hours of meaningful work, or eight hours of arriving physically and mentally intact enough to go straight into a meeting without looking like an extra from The Walking Dead.
So by all means keep the pictures of duvets and drinks. People like those. But perhaps … just perhaps, try advertising what truly differentiates you: the civilised airport experience, the time and cognitive load you save, and a cabin that’s actually optimised for doing business, not merely sleeping through it.
Or to put it in language even a hard‑nosed CFO can understand: stop selling “nice” and start selling “useful”. Give us baggage, boarding, lounges and a genuinely functional workspace with fast, reliable connectivity, and you won’t need to shout about a sale. The value will speak for itself.
Yours, somewhat turbulently,
Javvad Malik
Javvad Malik 