The Flower of Service for British Airways

Core Products

Services usually are defined with reference to a particular industry for instance, healthcare or transportation based on the core set of benefits and solutions delivered to customers. The core product is the central component that supplies the principal, problem-solving benefits customers seek. For example, transport services solve the need to move a person or a physical object from one location to another, management consulting should yield expert advice on what actions a client should take, and repair services restore a damaged or malfunctioning machine to good working order.

Supplementary Services

Delivery of the core product usually is accompanied by a variety of other service-related activities referred to the collectively as supplementary services. These service augment the core product, facilitating its use and enhancing its value and appeal to the customer's overall experience. Core products tend to become commodified as an industry matures and competition increases, so the search for competitive advantage often emphasizes supplementary services. Adding supplementary elements or increasing their level of performance should be done in ways that enhance the perceived value of the core product and enable the service provider to charge a higher price.

British Airways Overview

A member of the royal family of European airlines, British Airways (B.A) serves about 150 destinations in some 75 countries from hubs at London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports. The carrier operates a fleet of more than 240 aircraft, consisting mainly of Airbus and Boeing jets. BA extends its network via code-sharing relation-ships, chiefly with AMR's American Airlines and other members of the Oneworld global marketing alliance, such as Iberia and Qantas. (Code-sharing allows airlines to sell tickets on one another's flights and thus offer passengers additional destinations.) Among Europe's flag carriers, B.A is outranked only by the combined Air France-KLM and by Deutsche Lufthansa.

The Augemented Service

British Airways is well known for the quality of the experience provided. The flower of services theory are applied in order to break down and study all the supplementary (enhancing and facilitating) services that the company provides in order to deliver the core service, that is the actual flight, and to differentiate itself from competitors. We will see that the company and its partners (the airport staff, the support vehicles, etc) have to put a lot of effort and resources in the supplementary services while the actual flight has a relatively small part in the process. These facilitating services, although necessary, are perceived by the customers mostly as hygienic factors