Three imaginative airline services

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Last weekend I had the good fortune to fly on an American Airlines Boeing 787-9 from London Heathrow to Dallas. It was an excellent flight in every respect.

Despite cloud cover all the way across the Atlantic and most of the way across North America, the views of an icy Labrador coast and the glaciers inland were spectacular. I was also treated to a fine view of a frosty Chicago.

The food was excellent, the service too. When I thanked one of the Cabin Crew for looking after me she said “we have to!”, but in a way clearly expressing that this was what they wanted to do rather than what they had been told to do.

Flying longhaul is quite a remarkable thing – depending on your cabin you get anything from a flying cinema to a flying bed. Magic lamps and flying carpets would have nothing to beat modern air travel.

The whole experience got me thinking: if air travel can be this good, how can it be improved. That is, how can it be improved at little cost beyond tinkering around the edges to refine existing services and ensuring product consistency.

So I have identified three genuinely new services that I believe no airline does today but I reckon they could implement in practice to improve the experience.

Some might say that these services are impossible. But I say they can be done, and done without significant technical investment. Now read on…

New service one: notify passengers if their bag did not make the flight

When I check a bag it does not always come off cleanly at the other end. On a trip in 2023 my bag did not appear in both directions.

What really upset me about this was that the airline, in this case British Airways, knew in advance that the bag did not make it but did not tell me about it. So I stood at the carousel like a muggins until everyone’s bag had appeared.

If the airline had told me about it I could have submitted my claim online and been on my way into town.

The problem was that I had connected in London from Newcastle. At the time it was the busy summer season and Heathrow’s Baggage Handling System (BHS) was at capacity.

British Airways actively chose to truck bags between Heathrow and Newcastle to get the plane off on time. Which meant they did not make the connections.

The reason I found this out was first that when I arrived back in Newcastle, nobody’s bag came off apart from those who had gate checked. Instead of the airline telling us, we all waited at the carousel for 30 minutes before the all bags delivered message appeared.

To complete the picture, the courier who delivered the bag two days later told me that his firm was fully booked shipping bags between London and Newcastle for every British Airways flight.

I made my conclusions about the BA and the Heathrow BHS from these two experiences.

The thing is, that it would be the easiest thing in the world for airline ground handling agents to print a list of names for passengers whose bags had not made the flight and put them up on a board next to the carousel.

Indeed I experienced this myself when I arrived in Tokyo Haneda Airport, although luckily my bag had made it this time.

There is no special technology required. No radio tags. Just a reconciliation of the bags loaded and the bags not loaded, then a notice printed.

It might be tricky for ground handlers to prioritise this for high volume local flights, but for longhaul it should be the industry standard.

New service two: first-on, last-off

When I arrive in distant lands I am never quite sure how long it is going to take to get through immigration. Sometimes I am straight through. Other times it takes a while.