Virgin Express too has failed to achieve the usual Branson marketing success

Virgin Express, too, has failed to achieve the usual Branson marketing success. The need for sharp, stylish design was recognised early by Go; the airline says its image is well-regarded by the 30 per cent of its passengers who are travelling on business.Another impediment for no-frills airlines seeking business custom is that most bookings are made direct – little or no commission is paid to travel agents. “The trouble with easyJet is that its whole look is cheap”, says one frequent flyer. The airline has now launched its own no-frills operation, Buzz which will take over five KLM UK routes in January.Increasingly in business, image is improvement, and that has been a problem for easyJet and Ryanair. That figure’s only five per cent in Europe, so there’s plenty of room for growth.”Not everyone would agree that BA’s motives are entirely expansive. Since Go commenced, two rival no-frills airlines – AB Airlines and Debonair – have gone out of business in the face of intense competition.Loyal customers of KLM UK, too, were dismayed to lose long-established domestic links when the carrier restructured its business (see panel, right). It has so far pumped pounds 20 million into Go, the low-cost offshoot that started flying last year.

The airline’s intention, says sales and marketing director David Magliano, is to expand the market: “In the States, low-cost airlines account for 25 per cent of all passenger journeys. There was also an unexpected benefit: people running small businesses identified with easyJet much more than with British Airways and British Midland.BA’s response showed how seriously Britain’s biggest airline takes the threats, and opportunities, of no-frills aviation. Lurid orange advertising hammered home the message that you could fly between England and Scotland for pounds 29. The paint job on the planes consisted of the easyJet telephone number.Initially, the intention was to create new leisure traffic, but business travellers soon saw the logic of flying for a quarter of the fare that the established airlines were asking. But safety was never negotiable: Southwest also happens to be the safest airline in the world. Having emulated the model, and nailing down the easyJet’s cost base as low as possible, it was necessary to create a market.

“All you had to do was compare what people paid in the US relative to what people paid in the UK and Europe, and I said to myself there must be money to be made here.”Southwest’s secret was hardly rocket science: it involved looking at each stage of the operation of an airline, and stripping out all but the essentials. The Greek shipping millionaire had travelled widely in the United States on board Southwest Airlines, which has been consistently profitable while sharply reducing fare levels on every route it serves. Between the English and Scottish capitals, there are now a dozen no-frills flights each way, each working day, operated by easyJet and its arch-rival Go. One-third of the passengers on board are business travellers.
November 1995 was when the aviation map of Britain was redrawn.