It must be a busy time in the PR department at British Airways. Stories have been flowing through the press about that airline almost daily, waxing and waning in appeal like a good news/bad news joke.

Last week, the information that “BA is launching £86 transatlantic flights” actually appeared in a national paper’s headline; it must have been champagnes aclink in the department that day. That’s a headline perfectly designed to get a million fingers tapping on keyboards in search of such excellent value. If impatient readers failed to spot that this actually relates to BA’s new sister airline, Level, so much the better: they’ll tap on to the main British Airways website and traffic is money.

Sadly, there’s many a slip ’twixt tap and click; those sparkling flutes will have frozen midair at the publication of news that “BA runs out of loo rolls!”

Earlier this month, apparently, a flight to Barbados was delayed at London Gatwick for nearly six hours while ground crew restocked the plane due to a shortage of toilet roll. Why so long? That hasn’t been made clear, but no doubt you could wipe your arse on the amount of red tape required to re-stock anything at a big company. God forbid someone just nips into Boots at the terminal, back in 10 minutes.

In other news, BA flights have been running out of food.

At the beginning of this year, they stopped serving free meals on short-haul flights, offering snacks for sale instead. Most of us wouldn’t have known about that yet (Who’s on a plane between January and March? What are you, Prince Andrew?) were it not for a spate of stories, tweets and grumpy letters to the Daily Telegraph about low supplies. There have been reports of trolleys emptying after a few rows, children sobbing with hunger and (on one flight to London from Innsbruck, according to the Daily Mail), three sandwiches available for 110 passengers. You’d need Jesus himself to serve that meal.

This kind of publicity is terrible for British Airways. It doesn’t suit it in the way it suits Ryanair. Ryanair somehow manages to use the idea of hardship and grimness on its budget airline to enhance the brand; every story about meanness and calf cramp just reminds people how much money is “saved” on the tickets. If your USP as a brand is only about cheapness, the customer finds satisfaction in discomfort, like a skilled dieter “enjoying hunger pangs”. When Ryanair announces a new plan to halve seat sizes, ban books or remove toilets entirely and replace them with small cardboard beakers, a thrifty holidaymaker hears the comforting bell of frugality.

 

That minibreak in Stockholm suddenly doesn’t seem so self-indulgent; she books it quickly, mentally tapping her back pocket like in the old Asda adverts.

But people don’t want British Airways to be cheap. We still think of it as our national airline, even though it was privatised 30 years ago. With its big broad name, its flag-like logo and the fact that (if you’re as old as I am) it was a national airline when you first went on it, we still align it with the country itself. We can’t help feeling patriotic about it – it represents the United Kingdom.

So we want British Airways to be at the top of its game: shiny and clean, efficient and successful, comfortable and well run.

We don’t want incoming foreign visitors hunched in a tiny seat, tummies rumbling, speckled with damp from their own urine, going: “This is Britain, eh? I’d have thought they had things like loo roll and bread.”

This is an emotive issue for me because I’m very frightened of flying. If I can see where costs have been cut ’til the service squeaks, my brain wonders nervously about other savings: security, maintenance? If I were on a plane that had run out of anything at all, I’d worry about where else they had failed to plan ahead.

I always fly with British Airways, if I have to fly at all, because it feels big and familiar and national and safe. But those feelings are easily undermined.

It’s very problematic, for example, that you can’t really phone them. I’d always prefer to buy plane tickets by phone because a human voice is far more reassuring than a machine. But they keep you on hold so long, it feels like they’ve only got two people in the office.

That makes you think they’re struggling. You know they’re trying to force you on to the website, to keep costs down.

When you have to phone (as I did recently, because you can’t buy a seat for a 20-month-old child unless a staff member adds a special “infant in seat” code to the booking) you can be on hold for an hour, before being passed between departments where no one person can fulfil an entire request and no two people have the same advice. Good luck if you’re trying to call from a mobile in a foreign airport.

It all undermines the confidence, whittles away at the sense that everything’s safely taken care of. I worry about these visible cutbacks more than most, being a flying phobic, but everyone’s fear of flying is on the increase – for obvious reasons.

I think British Airways should forget about developing its own “budget” airline and certainly stop shaving expenditure on its flagship brand. Hire more phone staff and put the meals back. Better to increase the ticket price by £5 or £10 or even £20 to make the meal look free – and make the company seem happy, generous, thriving and dynamic.

British Airways isn’t where you go for £86 transatlantic flights. It can’t compete with Ryanair, so it should play a different game. Meticulous, reassuring, fully staffed, a bit glossy.

The phrase “a race to the bottom” is not what you want in people’s minds as they board an aeroplane.