- demand for the airline's passenger seats and cargo holds fell during the last financial year
- its fuel bill rocketed to almost £3 billion (US$4.7 billion)
- British Airways, like its premium-class competitors, is losing customers to cheaper rivals
The company has made a switch in strategy, trying to tempt passengers with lower fares, sacrificing profit per seat for "bums on seats." This idea is not new and comes from the budget airlines such as EasyJet, who know their customers and what they want. See http://bit.ly/pnQTr.
Interestingly that it should take a crisis such as this to force the company to provide its customers cheaper seats when this has been going on for some time now.
See here for the details of the crisis http://bit.ly/P90Nk
This strategy is unlikely to help significantly because the company is still looking at things from the inside out and it would take a complete re-evaluation of the company's focus, looking at things from outside in, to dig it out of this hole.