British Airways Plc’s cabin-crew strike may cost the carrier 1.4 billion pounds ($2 billion) in lost sales as travelers defect to rivals, a study shows.

Revenue typically drops as much as 18 percent in the year after consumers suffer a negative experience with a service or product, according to researchers at Manchester Business School who surveyed 4,300 customers and employees of 56 businesses.

“Some people will always fly BA, but many others are fickle and they’ll go where they want,” said Gary Davies, the school’s professor of corporate reputation. “I don’t think the company or trade unions are taking this seriously enough.”

British Airways has canceled flights for about 75,000 people so far this week as the strike by its 12,000 flight attendants enters a third day with no indication of a return to talks over the wage bill and staffing levels. The Unite union is planning further walkouts if it can’t reach a compromise with the company, which had sales of 8 billion pounds in fiscal 2009.

Revenue at Europe’s third-largest carrier will rebound to 8.5 billion pounds in the 12 months through next March, reaching 9 billion pounds in fiscal 2012, according to analyst estimates.

British Airways spokesman James von der Fecht declined to comment on the remarks from Davies, whose study ‘Reputation Gaps and the Performance of Service Organizations’ concludes that the “attitudes, tone of voice, body language and overall service delivery” of disgruntled workers can also hurt financial performance by substantially altering customer perceptions.

Unite joint General Secretaries Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson will meet with striking flight attendants at a rally near Heathrow Thursday. Crews began the current five-day walkout on May 24 after talks with Chief Executive Officer Willie Walsh broke down last weekend. No formal discussions have been held since, even though both sides say they’re prepared to meet.

British Airways, whose brand is worth about 4 billion pounds according to Davies, lost 43 million pounds during two strikes spanning seven days in March, contributing to a 425 million-pound full-year deficit, the biggest since the London- based company first sold shares to investors in 1987.

Better News

“At the very least people will be canceling bookings,” Davies said in an interview from Manchester, northern England. “They need some good news stories on the front pages, showing that management are calling it right. They need to be seen to be making some good decisions that actually stick.”

British Airways was judged to be the fourth-strongest consumer brand in the U.K. in the 2010 Superbrands survey of 2,100 adults, behind Microsoft Corp., Rolex Group and Google Inc. and ahead of Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola Co. in the top 10.

“We would be very keen, as an industry, to see British Airways resolve this as quickly as it can,” said Chris Crowley, of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives in a telephone interview. “With all the problems around the last thing we need is for one of the world’s biggest airlines to be striking.” (Bloomberg)