If you are regular business traveller between London and New York, you will almost certainly know about British Airways latest version of its Club World business class product – 10.4 inch personal screens, video on demand, wide, fully flat seats. Nice.

So you book (or get someone to book) you on flight BA 173 from Heathrow to JFK across the Atlantic to sample the new seat. But when you get on the plane, you quickly realise there’s something wrong – this isn’t New Club World, it’s Old Club World. While there’s nothing wrong with BA’s Old Club World – it was ground-breaking when it was first launched in the year 2000 and is still very comfortable – it’s not at all what you were expecting. The reason BA 173 is yet to get New Club World is that it is operated using a Boeing 777 rather than a Boeing 747.

The big problem is that airlines love to announce their new products as soon as they install them on a single aircraft. It may take years for them to be installed on an airline’s entire fleet. BA’s New Club World, for example, will not be on its entire long-haul flight until some time in 2009.

BA is not alone in this. The issue raised its head recently when Virgin Atlantic was rapped over the knuckles by the Advertising Standards Authority over an advert for its new Premium Economy seats.

The ASA’s issue was that the footnote which explained that the “bigger seats” and “separate cabin” were only available on 58% of Virgin’s services from Heathrow was too small to be noticed.

The answer to this problem is that airlines need to do more to make passengers aware of exactly what they’ll be getting at the point of booking. The information on the type of aircraft operating your flight is likely to be in your itinerary but unless you know exactly what that information means in practice, you’re none the wiser.

But even if airlines and travel agents do become more informative, there still remains the problem of a plane ‘going tech’, developing a technical problem that requires it to be taken out of service. This is fine for an airline if they have an identical aircraft to replace it. But as Singapore Airlines have discovered, it can be annoying for passengers who have booked to fly on a particular aircraft – the shiny, new Airbus A380, for example – when one of your handful of planes goes tech and you have to fly them home using smaller planes. With the size of the A380, that’s an awful lot of disappointed passengers.