Mark Muren, head of sales, British Airways
Grumbling about the incumbent flag carrier is the national sport of travel
buyers and travel management company bosses across Europe. British Airways in
the UK is no exception, so when United Airlines executive Mark Muren crossed
the Atlantic in November 2019 to become the UK airline’s head of sales, his chief
ambition was to make his new employer, if not more loved, at least more valued
by its corporate customers.
“We really need to pivot as a sales team to being very service-focused
and easy to do business with,” says Muren. “We have a vision at BA to become
the most respected selling team in travel. There are important commercials involved
in what we’re doing, there’s certainly customer perception, there’s a need to
improve some of the elements of our technology and our ways of working, but
ultimately what a travel manager needs from a partner is somebody they trust
and respect.”
Covid has not changed this strategy, he says. Practical manifestations
include a self-service corporate account management, scheduled to launch
later this year, but Muren has been hard at work on many other aspects of his
mission to improve relations with the corporate travel market, several of which
he shared with BTN Europe.
Business travel starts to recover
“It’s a little bit all over the place but we have seen week-on-week
builds pretty much sequentially for the last two months straight, and we don’t
we see anything on the horizon that’s going to interrupt that,” says Muren.
Despite the US remaining closed to Europeans, the transatlantic market is
among the most encouraging for BA. Volumes have returned to “well over 25 per
cent” of the level of 2019 since US travellers were readmitted to the UK
without quarantine at the beginning of August, says Muren.
In common with other
airlines, small and medium enterprises are leading the return for BA’s business
travel customers, although Muren also now sees “signs of recovery in banking
and the professional services sectors.”
Deciding how many frequencies to restore when demand remains limited is
the classic horse-or-cart dilemma for airlines but, says Muren: “We are being very assertive with the schedule.
It’s a little bit of a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. A quite robust
cargo business gives us the ability to operate a lot of flights with some sense
of security that they are at least going to break even. The network planning
guys normally have three or four planning schedules per year but they currently
have three or four per month.”
Customers are influencing the network rescheduling heavily, says Muren,
with his team forwarding constant feedback from corporate clients on when and
how much they intend to travel.
Corporate agreements
In common with most airlines, BA has been rolling over pre-Covid deals
with corporate clients, and it will stay that way for now unless clients submit
a new request for proposal backed by credible data.
“We’re extending deals without any kind of punitive action in terms of
share or revenue requirement,” says Muren. “Even when it’s not proactively
asked for, we’re offering that. We’re doing it so our teams and customers can
focus on one thing: getting back to travel.”
Given that “we don’t know what our networks are going to look like and
[clients] don’t know what their travel plans are going to look like,” there is
no rush to frame new agreements. When they do resume, Muren is keen to switch
customer performance targets from volume thresholds to market share, as is the
norm in his home country.
“I think it will be part of our toolkit as we look forward and it should
be,” he says. “It’s a trustworthy mechanism where everyone can say: ‘I don’t
know how much volume I’m going to have but I do know that I can make a decision
on what I do have.’”
Regulation or lack of schedule won’t make market-share deals viable
across all territories but, says Muren,
“I think it’s a great tool and under-utilised in a lot of countries, so
we would like to work with that certainly more than we have, but it won’t be
everywhere.”
Saying yes
Muren wants BA to say yes to its corporate customers more often.
“Historically, discounts have been a really important part of [corporate relationships]
but what we’ve done a less good job with at British Airways, especially
recently, is all the other stuff,” he says. “When you’ve got a customer that
needs to be moved to a different flight, when you’ve got something that
requires a complex change of plans, we haven’t done the best job of being able
to say 'yes' and find a solution.”
Introduction of the self-service portal is intended to facilitate the new
attitude. “There really shouldn’t be anything related to a PNR [passenger name
record] that we’re unable to offer to a corporate customer,” Muren says. “We
need the ability to execute on that or even to give them the opportunity to
execute that seamlessly on their own.”
Being more flexible is often an added cost for BA, so Muren is looking to
price that expense into agreements. “We need to work with soft-dollar types of
things and equip our customers, their agency partners and our sellers and our
sales leadership with a mechanism to be able to say 'yes' to something,” he says.
“We’re really talking about a new currency that we’ll utilise to enable people
to make those types of decisions very quickly. We should be able to say yes to
many, many more things.”
Fare classes and products
Travel buyers are noticing their average fares rising on some routes
where demand is exceeding heavily restricted supply. However, Muren says BA is doing its best to keep open lower
fare buckets for corporate clients and that departures where only the highest
fare classes remain available are “absolutely the exception” – for example when
countries open or close their borders.
Muren also points to new products aimed at helping the corporate market.
These include additional intermediate price points without having to go up to
the next fare bucket for bookings via New Distribution Capability; and
discounted one-way fares in business class. In addition, BA launched its Select
and Select Pro refundable fares for unmanaged corporate customers in February.
“If anything, we are looking to create more opportunities for customers,”
says Muren. “What we have learned in the pandemic is there is a need for more
products. We are looking very closely at our entire portfolio and you’ll see
more to come over the next few months.”
Emissions data
One of the biggest complaints of travel managers trying to make their
travel programmes more sustainable is that airlines fail to provide granular
flight-by-flight data about emissions, especially at point of sale. Muren is
acutely conscious of this problem and says “we’ll have much more to share about
that in the very near future.”
But he believes the travel industry needs to
cooperate to standardise emissions reporting for the corporate market, ideally
under the auspices of the International Air Transport Association or one of the
business travel associations. “It’s an area where we need to come together and
very concisely have that apples-to-apples comparison,” says Muren. “I can
wholeheartedly say we would love to participate in something like that.”