British Airways

48 hours ago, we first started to hear stories that British Airways was planning to remove its rule that requires passengers to wear face coverings on all flights. Less than 24 hours ago, British Airways announced that as of today, face coverings would only be required onboard flights where the relevant authority with jurisdiction over the flight requires masks to be worn. Now, a story has emerged which suggests that British Airways has had a change of heart.

While guidance has remained in place in some areas, the UK population has been free of domestic Covid restrictions for almost a month and despite a sign that hospitalisations due to Covid may be on the rise, the UK government has announced that all remaining travel restrictions are being lifted and the UK's two long-haul carriers have announced an end to mask-wearing onboard.

British Airways has announced plans to launch a new daily service between London Heathrow and Newark Liberty later this year as the airline continues to revive its long-haul network following two years in the doldrums.

Following on from yesterday's announcements that select Executive Club members will be having their elite statuses extended and that lower tier points targets will be in place for the whole of 2022, British Airways has now also announced that it is extending its offer of double tier points on bookings made with British Airways Holidays.

After more cancelled flights than I care to think back upon, I have finally had the chance to try out the (relatively) new Club Suite that British Airways is slowly using to replace its outdated Club World (Business Class) seats. A full review of the Club Suite will appear on TFM once I've experienced the seat on an overnight flight but, for now, I thought that I'd share my first impressions.

If you've tried to get through to British Airways to deal with a booking issue, you will probably have noticed that getting to speak to a fellow human being has become almost impossible. It doesn't matter what time of day you call, the automated phone service will almost inevitably hang up on you. Fortunately, there appears to be an incredibly simple way to get around this problem and it relies on the airline's greed.

British Airways announced that it would be the first airline to operate a year-round direct flight from the UK to Portland, Oregon, almost exactly two years ago but because of a little thing called a coronavirus, the route never launched as planned. Now the route is back on the BA map and all things being equal, it will launch almost exactly two years late.

British Airways has released details of its attempt at a Black Friday sale and to say that it's underwhelming would be an understatement. The airline is offering a limited number of roundtrip fares to the US East Coast from just £282 (which, admittedly, isn't too bad), there are one or two interesting Business Class deals (which aren't officially part of the Black Friday sale) and a few savings on holiday bookings. That's pretty much it.

With the US borders once again open to travelers originating in the UK, British Airways hasn't been wasting any time as it moves to increase capacity and get transatlantic services restarted. We've already seen the airline bringing back its A380s to serve four of its US routes and now BA has confirmed that it will have four more US routes back online by early December.

With multiple airlines questioning the viability of their A380s once the scale of damage the pandemic was doing to the travel industry became apparent, there was a time not very long ago when it looked like Emirates may end up being the only airline operating the biggest commercial airliner we've ever seen. Fortunately, that's not going to be the case and after announcing that it will fly its A380 to Johannesburg in January, British Airways has now scheduled the 'Whale Jet' on multiple other routes.