British Airways passengers may yearn for silver service in the skies. They are getting a free bottle of water and a packet of crisps. Newish boss Sean Doyle has pledged to restore the airline’s reputation for premium customer service. It’s a sensible strategy. BA has pursued it more or less successfully for decades. The problem Doyle faces is that compared with what passengers want, what BA can deliver can only end in disappointment. It isn’t all about the sandwiches, but it is a bit about them. When then-CEO Willie Walsh gave short-haul free food the chop in 2009, it was seen as the triumph of cost-cutting over customer service standards. The sacrosanct was sacrificed for a saving of only GBP22mn. Later boss Alex Cruz did it all again in 2016. There have been plenty of other causes for complaint. There was the 2017 IT outage that stranded passengers. The “national disgrace” that was the shambolic opening of Terminal 5. BA’s less than generous legroom on short-haul flights. The fact that its eight-across business class set-up meant you had to clamber over a stranger to answer a night-time call of nature, and its seats were increasingly shabby to boot. So if Walsh and Cruz were cost-cutters, Doyle is the customer champion. Thanks to him, free water and snacks are back on the BA menu. He listed other improvements too in a Sunday-morning missive to executive club customers, not all of which were sops: table ordering in lounges, a new baggage tracking system and upgrades to the customer call centres to cut waiting times. Maybe those changes do count as premium in an era when short-haul luggage is a luxury. Still they lack the grandeur that the airline’s operatic ads have encouraged potential passengers to imagine over the years, but which would require the budget of a Gulf carrier to implement. Story has more.<br/>