We don't know, but some of the signs are pretty "in your face". As we all know, BA decided to focus on the business traveller and reduce capacity for leisure and "coach" passengers. With 9/11, business travel has decreased significantly and it shows no signs of returning any time soon to the level it was at previously. According to BA, its business passengers decreased almost 30% while the coach passengers was only in the mid teens. That is a significant drop in passengers together, but it is more significant when you look at the details. BA is more reliant on business travelers because of their business strategy is close to the one used by MGM....a "luxury" airline. That means that they have almost neglected the needs of the customers that they need right now - the coach passengers. The result has been a mass exodus by travelers to go to the low fare carriers like GO, EasyJet, Ryanair, and now bmibaby. Demand has increased significantly for these airlines because of many reasons - for example, the economic times and the lack of seats on BA. In economic terms, this is described by the cross-price elasticity of demand....when any of the low fare airlines lower their price, BA's demand goes down significantly because they are substitutes. So, back to the problem at hand. BA's leisure business is leaving and going to the low fare carriers. So, that leaves BA with business travelers to support them. And with the decline in business travel, BA is not being supported well. Their profits have decreased significantly because of this and their loads have also. When BA brought out its new strategy, I knew it would be a bad idea. The decided to forget, in a sense, the leisure travellers but they forgot that when business travel is down, leisure travellers usually support the airline. BA also knew that when the economy is good, business people travel. However, they forgot that when the economy is not good, businesses find other ways for their people to do business without travelling as much or as expensively. They forgot to do a full SWOT analysis before they implemented their new strategy. That puts BA is danger because they don't have what their customers need and want....a major flaw that can ultimately mean the failure of a business. So, while I don't think BA will fail by the end of the year, they will probably exit this period severly bruised and beaten. Hopefully you all can understand what I wrote....feel free to comment. Alex Nieves On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 08:26:48 EST Leo Futia <LFutia@aol.com> writes: > How would we know that BA is going to fail? > > Leo/ORD >