BA now charging £80 return for your skis!

or upgrade to silver service and an extra inch of leg room for an extra £1,199! Skis go free :lol:

BA Long Haul business, I am assured, is excellent.

4x4 wrote:Soon it's going to be cheaper to arrange delivery of your gear to the hotel with a courier, someone like DHL!
:cry:

I've looked into that and it's not been cost effective. But, that was from Switzerland which is not EU, so without customs charges it might work out.

There is a couple of guy's I met at last years ski show who were starting up a delivery service with the added benefit of a ski service as well, I'll have to try and find their web site, it could be that
The airlines could just doing them selves out of some business through sheer greed. :evil:

AlistairS wrote:Interesting comments, When you consider BA used to offer free carriage on skis and may well of got more skiing customers as a result, I think they may loose custom if this is the case. I used BA last year and our skis went free of charge. The more competitive nature of the airline companies is bringing about casualties. I cannot understand why BA are charging so much more than the smaller companies however, look at the BA terms on the Inghams site and its there loud and proud £80 return for ski carriage. :(

I don't think this is surprising, it's just turned out they want your custom less than they did or less than people think they should. I think BA did particularly try and attract skiers as customers so they had a good deal, a deal as I keep pointing out is way better per kilo of luggage than any other traveller was getting.

But their results have been terrible, their worse ever loss last year and so on. Every kilo of extra weight burns fuel, around 10% of additional mass IIRC, so an extra 10kg is an extra kilo of fuel. That's real additional cost, the amount of fuel taken on board is decided just before takeoff, the heavier the plane then the more fuel the pilot signs for. Obviously there's increase in handling charges as well.

Some people (not your post) seem to have developed a keen sense of entitlement to cheap air travel and seem to think airlines are obliged to carry their skis for free or they should pay less per kilo than anyone else on the aircraft. Some airlines obviously wanted the business enough to offer good deals for skiers but it's a bit rich for them to be accused of being greedy just for charging skiers the same as everyone else has been paying for years.

If BA are charging 80 quid then that's pretty close to what the excess luggage charge would be, that runs typically around 10 quid a kilo so if you reckon skis might average 8kg it's spot on. Some other airlines are still offering substantial discounts to skiers for their luggage so it's probably worth shopping around.

I guess it depends who the airline see as their target traveller. If you are flying into say Chamberry in Feb then it's probably simpler to factor in the cost of hold baggage and probably ski carriage into the basic ticket price.
A certain airline that claims 10kg of cabin baggage is ample and then applies additional charges for hold luggage & further for ski's are a pain on a flight that is 90% skiers/snowboarders. That's why I don't use R***air for skiing.
On long haul flights or to non-ski destinations paying for ski carriage is reasonable as the ski carriage is the minority.

BA have a long history of forgetting who their target market is. Swapping a lot of their planes to cater for business class travellers just as the business class market slumped was just one example. I suspect that many will no longer see BA as a competitively priced airline for skiers when you add another £80 to an already high ticket price.

andymol2 wrote:I guess it depends who the airline see as their target traveller. If you are flying into say Chamberry in Feb then it's probably simpler to factor in the cost of hold baggage and probably ski carriage into the basic ticket price.
A certain airline that claims 10kg of cabin baggage is ample and then applies additional charges for hold luggage & further for ski's are a pain on a flight that is 90% skiers/snowboarders. That's why I don't use R***air for skiing.
On long haul flights or to non-ski destinations paying for ski carriage is reasonable as the ski carriage is the minority.

I think that's probably exactly what they're doing, I suspect some of the new limits on ski weights are based on their experience that 100 ski bags ought to be weighing in at under 1000kg or so and because they're stuffed with other stuff are way over weight for which the airline picks up the tab.

I think there's a bit more going on with long haul, once you've hauled it up in the air the marginal cost isn't so high for each extra km for a start but airlines are looking at fuel costs there as well. They've reduced packaging on in flight meals, got lighter cutlery and so on, seemingly small stuff but they've been shaving 1000's of kg off loads. I wouldn't bet that luggage isn't scrutinized more closely in future. It should still be fine, you get 30kg or more mostly on long haul so you ought to be able to shift everything in that weight.

I know some Ryanair and Easyjet flights are 90% skiers but that's during the winter which is their slack time, skiers don't come close to being a majority over the year as a whole.

Skiers pay less per kilo for their gear than anyone else, that's a fact, you can conclude whatever you want from that.