Concorde: The Value Gap
19 October 2026There are certain things I’m very happy to pay more for.
If something saves me time, removes a hassle or simply makes my life easier, I don’t always look for the cheapest option. Take home DIY for example, I’d much rather leave any stress to an expert than save a bit of money.
But that doesn’t mean I think everything is worth paying more for.
There are plenty of times I’ll look at the more expensive option and think, “What exactly am I getting for the extra money?”
And that’s an important distinction.
Because the answer to that question is in the customer’s head, not the seller’s. Which means a business can be quite badly wrong about it for a very long time.
Concorde is a brilliant example of why.
It was an extraordinary piece of engineering, flying passengers from London to New York in around three and a half hours. A journey that should have taken double that.
It was faster, more technologically advanced and more impressive than any aircraft flying alongside it.
And people were prepared to pay for it.
Concorde wasn’t a product that nobody wanted. There were customers who valued what it offered enormously. For the right customer, saving several hours on a transatlantic flight was worth paying a very high price for.
But Concorde was expensive to run. It burned an enormous amount of fuel for a small number of seats, and it was built for a very particular type of customer. Someone who valued their time highly enough to spend thousands more to save a few hours.
There were never going to be enough of those customers to turn supersonic travel into a mass market. Only twenty Concordes were ever built and only British Airways and Air France ended up operating them, mainly between London or Paris and New York.
Which meant the price mattered more than almost anything else. With that few seats and that few customers, getting it wrong was expensive.
And for years, British Airways got it wrong.
By the early 1980s Concorde was losing money. So someone did something that sounds obvious and almost never happens. They went and asked the passengers what they thought a ticket cost.
Most of them had no idea.
They weren’t the ones booking it. Their secretaries and travel departments did that. When pushed to guess, they guessed high, because they were senior people flying the fastest aircraft in the world and assumed it was priced accordingly.
So British Airways charged them what they already thought they were paying. The fares went up substantially.
Demand didn’t fall.
Concorde made money for British Airways for the best part of twenty years after that. Fourteen million pounds of profit in 1983. Fifty four million by 1987. Close to sixty million a year by the end of the nineties.
The aircraft hadn’t changed. The route hadn’t changed. The customers hadn’t changed.
The only thing that changed was that somebody finally found out what the customers thought they were buying.
And there’s a detail in that which is worth thinking about.
The reason British Airways didn’t know is that the person experiencing the value wasn’t the person paying for it. The passenger got there in three and a half hours. The secretary got the invoice. So every signal the business received about price came from somebody who had never been on the aeroplane.
That is more common than it sounds.
In plenty of businesses, the person who negotiates the price and the person who actually benefits from the work are two different people. And the business ends up pricing for the one who complains rather than the one who gets the value.
Which is where over-delivery becomes expensive.
It’s easy to look at a busy business and assume everything is working. The diary is full. Orders are coming in. Everyone is working hard.
But busy and profitable are not the same thing, and the gap between them is usually not where people look for it. It isn’t always costs. Quite often it’s that the business has never found out what its customers actually think they are buying, and has been charging accordingly.
Concorde didn’t nearly fail because nobody wanted to fly faster. People wanted it badly enough to pay far more than they were being asked for.
Nobody had asked them.
There’s something your customers value about working with you that you have never charged for. What do you think it is?
