As you drive out of British Airways’ Waterside headquarters in West London towards the M25, you pass close by Europe’s biggest construction project.

When the airline’s 49-year-old chief information officer Paul Coby passes what he refers to as “a large, well designed and beautiful shed” and what the rest of us know as Heathrow’s Terminal 5, he is constantly reminded of the technology challenges that face the airline. Simply put, unless the technology that Coby has planned works, that beautiful shed is going to be dreadfully congested.

Coby is typical of the new breed of technology executives and about as far from the “geek” image as epitomised by Bill Gates as you can get. When we met in early March to discuss the airline’s two-year business plan which had just been announced, he was wearing a stylish cream suit, crisp striped shirt and highly polished shoes and is well spoken and engaging.

Prior to joining British Airways in 1997, Coby was in the civil service, rising to the position of Principal Private Secretary of State for Transport. He became CIO in 2001 and has been instrumental in many of BA’s big technology changes, including the move of the airline’s reservation, inventory and departure control systems away from its own in-house systems to Amadeus. He also spearheaded the introduction of many of ba.com’s most popular features, such as calendar-based booking.  Perhaps the only flaw in this otherwise geek-free image is a stated interest in “pre-1914 railways in Britain and Germany”.

Coby has plenty to keep him occupied at the airline and his information management team will be instrumental in helping to make the £450 million of cost savings demanded by Coby’s boss, chief executive Willie Walsh, in a business plan that runs until the moment when BA finally gets the keys to Terminal 5.

One of Coby’s key missions in the next two years will be a drastic shift of channel. In December 2002, slightly fewer than one in nine bookings was made directly with the airline, with the rest going via travel agencies. Today, that figure is now one in four bookings, with most going through the airline’s website ba.com. Willie Walsh wants at least half of all bookings with the airline to be carried out directly by March 2008.

Unsurprisingly, ba.com is going to be at the heart of this push and the website will change dramatically this summer. One of the key changes will be to the calendar-based pricing introduced in 2002. The new-look booking engine (see picture) will retain the calendar element but will now show both the outward and return legs on a single screen, with the cheapest fare on any day clearly shown.

Preselection of seating will also become more important. “We are changing our seating policy so that will make it much easier to book seats in advance,” says Coby. “We have been around for a long while and have developed lots of different rules, which can be route specific and can mean that net result is that not many seats are available to be booked online. Because increasing numbers of our passengers are booking online earlier they will be able to secure seats earlier.”

The concept of shopping for a dynamic package consisting of flight, hotel, car hire and other travel elements will be central to the new look ba.com, extending the existing shopping basket facility.

The airline will also introduce the ability to pre-pay for excess baggage in advance online. This inevitably raises the question whether BA will follow carriers such as Flybe and Ryanair in charging passengers for hold luggage.

“Not in the foreseeable future,” says Coby with a laugh. “What we provide on BA mainline is good food and drink, we fly into mainstream convenient airports with good public transport connections, we provide you with back-up aircraft if there is a cancellation and do our best to look after you if things do go wrong. We try to build a long-term relationship with the customer. Hats off to Ryanair, they have been fantastically successful - it is a great business model. They have changed the way people fly and the way society works. We’re different and a baggage allowance is part of that proposition.”

The look and feel of the site will be one of the biggest changes. “We are making it much easier to use,” says Coby. “There are so many goodies on ba.com that if you use it a lot, you can get really good at using it. If you use it occasionally, it is not so easy and we’ll be fixing that.”
With Walsh wanting so much direct business, where does this leave the GDS channel. “ba.com is a very important channel for us,” says Coby. “It is very cost effective and gives us back a direct relationship with our passengers on terms of their choice. GDSs have provided, do provide and, I think, will continue to provide a very effective channel to the market and we will need to continue to use them for distribution.”

The online check-in and DIY boarding passes also get a revamp. Online check-in has been one of BA’s biggest technology pushes in recent years. Since its launch in the year 2000, it has grown to the point where it is now available on 180 routes. Coby says that 10 per cent of all passengers across the network and 12 per cent of Heathrow passengers now check in online. Of these, six per cent of passengers print their own boarding passes.

For Terminal 5, which Coby and his team have had significant input into, to work, these figures are going to have to rise significantly.
“We have set a target of 80 per cent of passengers either checking in online or using a self-service kiosk at Terminal 5,” he says.
Coby picks up the printout of his business plan and sketches out how he envisages the terminal will work, drawing three rows of boxes on the landside before the “funnel” of security. Passengers come first to a bank of self-service kiosks and then proceed to a row of fast bag drop desks for those carrying baggage. After that sits a row of customer service desks.
I question him further about Fast Bag Drop, since many regular passengers are starting to thing that the Fast element of the title is something of a misnomer.

“Fast Bag Drop has to do what it says on the can. Part of the problem we have at the moment is that we are working in terminals that were designed for paper, with constrained space Fast Bag Drop takes a long time because people have some issues that need resolving rather than people who are moving quickly through it. The great news about Terminal 5 is that we have been able to design it for the online age.”

Coby then adds another row of boxes, sitting outside the terminal. “In fact there are effectively four waves,” he says, “there are also the people sitting at home or the office using ba.com to check in online.”

So much for technology on the ground, what about Coby’s plans for in-flight?
In the business plan, on-demand in-flight entertainment has been pencilled in for all four classes of travel although little has been said about other developments on the plane, such as wireless and the technology to allow mobile phones to work onboard.
When asked about BA’s plans in these last two areas, Coby has to stay tight-lipped. It emerges that Coby is on the board of OnAir, the joint venture between Airbus and aviation technology firm SITA, which will provide on-board connectivity for new Airbus aircraft, including the A380.

This unusual employment situation inevitably raises the question whether BA will add the A380 to its fleet. At present, it uses Boeing aircraft in the main except for A319/320 and 321s on some European and UK domestic routes. The business plan doesn’t rule it out entirely but says no long-haul aircraft will be added to the fleet before the airline moves into Terminal 5.

As part of Coby’s commitment to Willie Walsh’s vision for BA, he has signed up his own department to tough targets.
“We have committed to a 35 per cent productivity improvement over the next two years in terms of IT. That means delivering more projects but also delivering them 20 per cent faster...I was just telling the senior managers in the department – 25 per cent less than there were a month ago, of course – that this is the key thing for controlling Terminal 5.”
What comes across most about Coby throughout the course of our interview is that he is less an IT nerd and more a savvy businessman. He is one of those successful technology people for whom technology is not an end in itself. Indeed, one of his mantras is “there are no IT projects, only business projects”.

That attitude should sit well with Willie Walsh and, should Coby need a reminder, he will always have the drive past the “beautiful shed” to keep his mind on the business at hand.