“Transatlantic rivals British Airways and Virgin Atlantic join forces today to celebrate the reopening of the US to UK nationals.”British Airways
British Airways
over time
Every year keeps its colour across every chart.│ ChatGPT, 30 Nov 2022
16 of British Airways's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other travel brands, and what it sounds like in its own words.
- Pages measured
- 16
- Years covered
- –
- Archived before ChatGPT
- 0
- Blog · press
- 12 · 4
16 pages only. The writing numbers on this page are context, not findings: there are no sector rankings or comparisons below 30 pages.
01 · Homepage
One capture a year
British Airways's homepage from 2000 to 2021, closest to 1 July, from the Internet Archive. Pick a year or press play. Each headline is quoted from its capture and links to the archived copy.
Screenshot of British Airways’s homepage (britishairways.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 2 Jul 2021. © British Airways or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by British Airways.
Homepage
2021
“COVID-19: Planning and travel advice”
Page title
British Airways | Book Flights, Holidays, City Breaks & Check In Online
- 2007british airways logo and site links
- 2009Welcome to ba.com
- 2015Non-stop flights to Paris on OpenSkies
- 2016Create a trip of your choice
- 2020Reserve ahora y cambie después
- 2021COVID-19: Planning and travel advice
19 captures. Screenshots are rendered from the archive and can pull in images archived later than the page itself; dates come from the capture. Years without a capture are greyed out in the strip.
02 · Measures by year
How the writing moved
Every year’s pages, averaged. Pick a measure. Hatched bars rest on fewer than 10 pages: context, not a finding. The page count sits under each year.
Years with pages: . Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).
03 · Against its sector
British Airways among travel brands
Each dot is one brand’s mean across all its measured pages; the tick is the sector average. Only brands with 10 or more measured pages are shown or counted. British Airways has fewer than 30, so it is placed for context but not ranked. Select a dot to open that brand.
Pages measured: British Airways 16 · easyJet 23 · Ryanair 0 · Jet2 118 · Virgin Atlantic 77 · TUI 189 · Loganair 1 · Trainline 34 · National Express 1 · Eurostar 0. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.
04 · In its own words
What it sounded like
Openings of real pages, quoted word for word, oldest first. Each links to the page, or to the Internet Archive’s copy when it has gone.
“Transatlantic rivals British Airways and Virgin Atlantic join forces today to celebrate the reopening of the US to UK nationals.”British Airways
“On 19 March 1948, BOAC extended its Poole-Hong Kong Plymouth class flying boat service to Iwakuni. In November, the weekly service was further extended to Yokohama, Tokyo, with flights taking seven days and stopping at seven cities on route - Augusta, Alexandria, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Iwakuni.”British Airways
“On 19 March 1948, BOAC extended its Poole-Hong Kong Plymouth class flying boat service to Iwakuni. In November, the weekly service was further extended to Yokohama, Tokyo, with flights taking seven days and stopping at seven cities on route - Augusta, Alexandria, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Iwakuni.”British Airways
05 · Every page
All 21 pages, by year
The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 16 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (5 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.
In the overall numbers, no year16 pages
- British Airways27 Aug 2026 · press · 1,532 wordsDate only from the page text, not metadata, URL or archive capture: in the overall numbers, not placed in a year
- British Airways23 Aug 2023 · press · 886 wordsDate only from the page text, not metadata, URL or archive capture: in the overall numbers, not placed in a year
- British Airways8 Nov 2021 · press · 1,372 wordsDate only from the page text, not metadata, URL or archive capture: in the overall numbers, not placed in a year
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,017 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,500 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,498 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,485 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,487 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,002 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,004 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- About tier pointsundated · announcement · 1,894 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,502 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,467 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,008 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,489 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 984 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year
Not measured5 pages
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,017 wordsSame text as an earlier page from this brand: only the earliest copy is measured
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,500 wordsSame text as an earlier page from this brand: only the earliest copy is measured
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,017 wordsSame text as an earlier page from this brand: only the earliest copy is measured
- Explore our pastundated · blog · 1,487 wordsSame text as an earlier page from this brand: only the earliest copy is measured
- Lifetime tier pointsundated · blog · 1,004 wordsSame text as an earlier page from this brand: only the earliest copy is measured
06 · Method
How this was measured
The pages
British Airways's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, fetched from the live site in 2026 and from the Internet Archive for 2015 to November 2022. Homepages are shown as captures; product and help pages are not measured.
The measures
Code counts from ScriptGrain’s writing instruments: sentence length and rhythm, contractions, pronouns, punctuation, long words, and three published lists of AI-associated words. No AI model reads or judges any page.
What it cannot say
These measures describe style. They cannot tell who or what wrote a page, and nothing here says or implies that any brand used AI to write.
Sample sizes
Every number carries its page count. Years under 10 pages, and before-and-after comparisons with under 10 pages on a side, are shown as context only.
- Sentence length
- Average words per sentence.
- Sentence rhythm
- How much sentence length varies (standard deviation over mean). Higher reads less even.
- Contractions
- Contractions (we're, you'll, it's) per 1,000 words. A rough gauge of how conversational the writing is.
- "You"
- Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "you": how much the writing addresses the reader.
- "We"
- Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "we": how much the writing talks about the organisation.
- Questions
- Question marks per 1,000 words.
- Exclamations
- Exclamation marks per 1,000 words.
- Long words
- Share of words with seven or more letters.
- Em dashes
- Em dashes per 1,000 words.
- AI-associated words
- Words from SGR-007's three AI-associated lists, per 1,000 words. These are style markers that people used long before ChatGPT; a higher rate says nothing about who or what wrote the page.
- AI-era marketing words
- Marketing words that became more common in AI-era copy (seamless, elevate, unlock...), per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
- Quieter LLM-favoured words
- Everyday words language models are known to over-use, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
- AI-associated sentence shapes
- Sentence patterns such as "not just X, but Y", found by ScriptGrain's cliche checker, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
- Page length
- Average words per page.
Studies: SGR-009: Do brands in the same sector sound the same? · SGR-010: How UK brands write · SGR-011: Did brand writing change after ChatGPT?.