Woody Harford
The Transnationalrecently spoke with Woody Harford, British Airways senior vice president of commercial in North America, about relationships with corporate clients, BA's alliances and corporate travel demand. Harford also discussed BA's plans for an all-business class service between New York and London City Airport, targeted for a 2009 launch and designed to accommodate corporate customers. BA has not decided whether that service would operate from New York JFK or Newark, and has not planned any code shares with partners on those flights, but does foresee connecting opportunities at London City to points in Continental Europe. "The bottom line is that the marketplace has become more competitive with the introduction of Eos, the introduction of Silverjet and Open Skies [liberalization between the United States and Europe] coming," Harford said. "It is not a direct response to Eos. It is a direct response to customers telling us that they are interested in these types of services."
Regarding corporate demand, what is your outlook for the rest of this year?
We get more than our fair share of the premium travel market internationally. I expect that will continue as we roll out our new Club World product and introduce a number of other products and service improvements that we have coming online over the course of the next six to 12 months. We are as well-positioned as any airline out there to get a better share of what is arguably a softer market than it has been over the past three years. But we do not see anything resembling a bottom-dropping-out scenario. There are customers who are realigning their businesses based on some of the new economic realities that they are going to face over the course of the next six to 12 months.
How is British Airways enriching relationships with corporate accounts?
Most of the corporate relationships we have, we have had for many, many years and it is rare that British Airways loses a corporate relationship. We have what I believe to be the best and most consistent service product in the air. We offer some of the best account management services. We also have other products and services that support the business market, including a product for the small and medium-size market--called OnBusiness--which is specifically designed for customers that either cannot or don't yet qualify--because their volumes are not there--for a corporate relationship.
What is it about British Airways' account management that makes you confident it is the best?
There is a level of professionalism that we bring to working with our corporate customers. The average tenure of a British Airways account manager is a lot longer than that of a lot of our domestic competitors. These are people who have been through the good times and the bad times, and know how to manage relationships through all those different types of business cycles. And customers come to rely on that.
British Airways, like other airlines, has talked a lot about the work it has done to become more efficient and environmentally aware, and has offered individual consumers an opportunity to offset the carbon associated with their flights. How does that mindset enter into relationships with corporations?
Right now, it really is only the most sophisticated of purchasers who are making this part of their purchasing decisionmaking process. In those situations, we share with them all the different plans we have on our corporate social responsibility agenda. With respect to how companies are purchasing from airlines, that's really in its nascent stage. I don't want to say it's price, price, price, because it's not with a lot of our customers. But it's a combination of price, product, service and, increasingly, the approach to corporate responsibility. [Measuring carbon emissions for all of an account's travel] is not a mainstream-type of request. We have not done any specific work to try to give companies that, because it is going to be predicated on a whole host of factors: where they are flying, what time of year, what type of routing ... It can get extraordinarily complex. To the best of my knowledge, it is not yet an exact science.
What is the latest on the Oneworld alliance regarding corporate sales?
Oneworld offers a fair number of really good consumer benefits. It is frankly very competitive with the other major alliances. Clearly, the Oneworld proposition in the United States--from a corporate perspective--is probably not nearly as fully developed as its competitors, simply because, from an antitrust situation, we are not allowed to do that. We are not as competitive on that front as we would like to be, but the cost of getting that is just too high. We have been successful in other markets using Oneworld. In Canada, we have done some work together to be more competitive as a network of airlines, versus other competing alliance networks, and we have done some of that work in other parts of the world, where it is legal and where we have the folks in place to take advantage of it. In the U.S., without antitrust immunity and competing against folks that do have it, it is a tough road to hoe.