BA's foot-and-mouth loss

A combination of factors hit BA revenues in March

British Airways' revenues for March have been hit by the foot-and-mouth crisis, the US economic slowdown and a failure of its computer reservations system.

BA said revenues for March would be down by between £15m and £20m ($21.3m and $28.3m).

"There is evidence that revenues in March were impacted by a number of factors, including the slowing of the US economy, foot-and-mouth disease and the computer problems in the second and third week of March," BA said in a statement.

The bad news comes just after BA returned to profitability after making a loss last year for the first time since privatisation.

BA said overall traffic in March fell 8.9% from last year, including a decline of 3% in premium traffic.

Computer glitch

A fault in BA's mainframe computer last month led to the delay of hundreds of flights after its reservation system crashed.

The airline expects the computer problem to have some impact on its figures for both April and May because the booking system was affected for 10 days.

BA check-in staff around the world were unable to access some bookings or sell some flights, and had to manually process passengers at airports.

Back in profit

The airline reported pre-tax profits of £65m for the last three months of 2000, compared to a £60m loss for the same period a year earlier.

The improvements followed a restructuring programme which involved big job cuts and a strategy to cut back unprofitable routes.

Despite the impact on revenues last month, BA's Club World operation, which includes planes with beds in business class, grew during March.

BA has been reducing its capacity to focus on improving service, particularly in business class, where flat beds were introduced on a number of flights.