A strange British Airways advert on Instagram

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Following a recent flight, I had some spare time on my hands thanks to the fact that someone at Heathrow doesn’t appear to understand that scheduled flights require someone to meet them and to operate their assigned jet bridge, so I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through Instagram.

My mind wasn’t really absorbing much of what the various reels and posts were highlighting until one made me do a double take. Specifically, it was this post/advert from British Airways that caught my eye:

Until you get approximately half-way down the advert there isn’t anything obviously wrong, but that all ends when you land on the line that reads “each way based on a return fare”.

This is very obviously a promotion for BA’s Club Europe Business Class product (it says as much in the small bit of text at the bottom) and when you read the wording carefully, you see that the post is stating that BA’s Business Class flights for travel between the UK and Europe cost “from £251 each way”.

But they don’t.

If you head over to the British Airways website and use the airline’s cheap fare finder, you’ll find that Club Europe flights often cost considerably less.

Right now, for example, you can fly to Berlin from £125 each way, to Milan from £148 each way, to Paris from £127 each way, and to Rome from £195 each way.

In fact, out of the 109 European routes that you’ll find listed on the cheap fare finder page, only 16 have Club Europe fares starting at over £251 each way.

I guess the likelihood here is that someone added the words “each way based on a return fare” by mistake … but even without those words the advert would still be wrong because there are multiple European routes served by British Airways on which round trip Business Class fares start from less than £251.

So, what’s going on? Am I missing something?

I’ve noticed quite a few incorrect/misleading adverts for flights over the years, but this is the first time that I’ve seen an advert where the mistake (deliberate or otherwise) is not in the airline’s interest and actually makes the airline’s offering look worse than it really is.

Assuming that I haven’t missed anything, the people in charge of BA’s social media advertising and the person charged with proofreading this advert should probably take a long look at themselves. It really isn’t a good look when an airline doesn’t appear to know how much it charges for flights.