A customer-experience case study. Dr. RB Hernández-Cruz, Data Analytics Portfolio.
Data: 3,557 public British Airways reviews, August 2012 to October 2023.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dharun4772/british-airline-review-dataset
British Airways sells more than a seat. It sells a brand. The motto sits on the airline’s crest: To Fly. To Serve, and it promises a premium national carrier built on service and trust. So when a customer rates a flight, they are not really scoring the food or the legroom in isolation. They are telling you whether they still felt the brand they were sold.
British Airways is specific about what that brand is. The airline publishes three values, Excellence, Caring, and Open-minded, and describes its culture as delivering world-class service to every customer, every time. In its own words, Excellence means striving for excellence in every interaction, and Caring means ensuring customers feel heard and valued. Read that way, the six sub-ratings are not soft feedback. They are the closest thing we have to a scorecard for whether British Airways is living up to its stated values.
That is the question I set out to answer. Not is the food good, but are customers still experiencing British Airways? I put myself in the seat of a customer-experience consultant advising BA’s cabin-service and CX leadership. They have a limited improvement budget and a simple decision to make. Where do they spend it first?
To answer that, I used 3,557 public British Airways reviews spanning August 2012 to October 2023. Each review includes an overall rating out of ten, a yes-or-no on whether the traveler would recommend BA, and six sub-ratings, each scored from 1 to 5: seat comfort, cabin staff service, food and beverages, ground service, value for money, and entertainment. Each of those six is a place where the brand is either delivered or quietly broken. My guiding assumption is stated up front. People who post to a public review site tend to hold strong opinions, so this is a diagnostic of what moves customers, not a representative survey of the average passenger. I treat it that way throughout.
The headline context is not comfortable reading for British Airways. Across the full dataset, only 40 percent of reviewers said they would recommend the airline, and the mean overall rating is 4.7 out of 10. This is a customer base writing in to say the brand is not landing.
The tension is this. British Airways still charges and still markets as a premium carrier. Its brand equity, its loyalty program, and its pricing all rest on the promise that flying BA is worth more than flying a budget competitor. If customers no longer feel that difference, the premium is a claim the product no longer backs up. That is not a catering problem. It is a brand-credibility problem that compounds quietly because a customer who feels overcharged does not complain to a flight attendant. They stop choosing BA and explain to others why.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Reviews analyzed | 3,557 (2012–2023) |
| Would recommend BA | 40.2% |
| Mean overall rating | 4.71 / 10 |
| Only aspect scoring above 3/5 | Cabin staff service (3.25) |
| Strongest driver of recommendation | Value for money (r = 0.80) |
A note explaining the 8 out of 10 line for “Excellence”, because it is the kind of number a reader should be allowed to question. The line comes from a standard convention in customer-experience measurement, the same logic behind Net Promoter scoring. On a 0-10 scale, only the top end counts as genuine advocacy. A 7 is a shrug. 8 and above is where a customer actually champions you. I want to be upfront that this is a chosen convention, not a number the data hands me. What makes it defensible is that the finding barely depends on the exact line. British Airways does not average even six out of 10 in any cabin, segment, or year, so the conclusion holds whether you set the bar at six, seven, or eight.
The same convention sets the aspect scale. On the one to five sub-ratings I treat four and above as strong and three as the midpoint. By that measure BA reaches neither. Its best score, cabin staff at 3.25 out of five, does not clear four, and nothing else clears three. The charts that follow mark these benchmarks so the reader sees the gap, not just the ranking
I started by averaging each of the six service aspects across all reviews. The result splits the brand cleanly in two. Cabin staff service is the only aspect that clears the midpoint of the scale, at 3.25 out of 5. Everything else sits below three: seat comfort 2.87, ground service 2.79, food and beverages 2.71, value for money 2.68, and entertainment 2.65 at the bottom.