BA charged me £45 to choose a seat. So I booked Swiss

A first-person case study in how a small surcharge destroys a premium relationship. Business-class fare ~£500; seat selection wanted £45–55 each way. He booked Swiss instead.

> "It's not the amount that was the problem. You react to the move, not the money."

What the fee actually communicated: BA had stopped thinking of him as a customer to keep and started thinking of him as a customer to squeeze.

The core concept — relational vs transactional contracts

Relational contract = the implicit rules a customer thinks they're operating under with a service brand. The more you pay, the more the brand invests in you. Nobody itemizes every interaction; "there's a rough sense of mutual goodwill running underneath."

Transactional contract = budget model. Every cup of tea, every bag, every seat charged separately. > "There's nothing wrong with this model" — Ryanair can "charge you for the privilege of breathing" because "nobody flies Ryanair expecting to be loved." You know exactly what you're getting because nothing is implied.

The damage isn't the fee — "it's that the contract was rewritten without anybody telling me." "I thought we were in one kind of relationship; it turns out we were in another."

Price partitioning at the end of a purchase

Your brain doesn't evaluate £90 of seat fees against the total cost of getting to Zurich — it evaluates against the £500 fare you'd already accepted. It's another ~20% after you've mentally closed the deal, which "feels like a grift."

Same mechanism: a table d'hôte "included" menu where almost every item carries a surcharge.

The invisible cost — and reclassification

> The people signing this off "can see the revenue from passengers who paid the fee, but they can't see the passengers who refused."

He then told two clients booking his flights not to book BA — costing them "two long-haul business class fares worth about £10 grand," and more, because he won't fly them again.

> High-spending customers are unusually sensitive to this "because they're paying for the category, not the product." When a relational brand behaves transactionally, the customer doesn't downgrade their opinion slightly — they reclassify you. "Once you've been reclassified as a budget brand with airs and graces, there isn't a fee structure in the world that gets you back."

The "complimentary" complaint

Hotels calling breakfast, lounge access and dry cleaning complimentary on a suite booking: "None of it is complimentary. It's included." If it were free, the room rate would equal a standard room.

The minibar story: minibar "included," but not replenished after day one. His response — ask to be checked out at 12:00 and back in at 3:00 daily, since they restock on check-in. "It's pennies" — but "this measly penny-pinching destroys any goodwill."

The test

> Before you add the charge or change the policy, the question isn't whether the numbers work on a spreadsheet.

Cross-references

• Partitioned pricing theory → 8b7cB654FcI · One-number rule → jwMwe0aBGUU
• Trust asymmetry → RukLSX4N1BM · Silent defection → KW9oUscVZ5k