http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40075721JeremyP has already started another thread on this topic in Science and Technology.
I would like to consider another aspect of the same problem here - the attitude of British Airways management to its customers. This is not about the employees and agents that customers actually meet, operational staff, but about the remote administration and management staff.
The current BA problem appears to suggest that the management are engaged in damage limitation rather than customer care - presumably driven by the prospect of having to find £150,000,000 in compensation. If news reports are accurate, customers are being left to their own devices at airports all over the world. It would seem that BA has learned nothing over the years.
In 23 December 2013 I was at the departure gate at Gatwick queuing to board a BA aircraft when the captain appeared and told us that, due to adverse weather conditions, our destination airport, Jersey, had been closed. BA staff arranged overnight hotel accommodation for me and booked me on a flight for the following day. So far, so good.
The weather that night was atrocious. The following morning, Christmas Eve, North Terminal was in chaos. An underground substation had been flooded and there was no electricity. The terminal was filled with BA and EasyJet passengers all waiting for a departure to a holiday destination. My rebooked flight was at 18.00, I had a day to kill.
At about midday I decided to check in and go airside. I was directed towards a huge pile of luggage to deposit my suitcase because the normal baggage handling facilities were not working. The airside lounge was a mass of angry people (mainly EasyJet passengers) who were progressively being told that their flights had been cancelled. Armed policemen were wandering around and were sometimes confrontational in their behaviour (on one occasion, a policeman shouted angrily at an elderly woman that he was not a bloody information system).
As the afternoon progressed, the general situation eased, but there was one commodity totally absent - information. There was no BA representative. No member of BA management considered the situation sufficiently important to tell passengers exactly what the situation was. The only source available to customers was the digital display, which for each flight announced that details would be available in due course.
My flight was eventually displayed and we took off at 22.20 - a delay of over four hours. I arrived in Jersey at about 23.00 with no luggage (at least the car I had hired was waiting for me).
I am aware that the circumstances were exceptional. I'm sure that the operational staff were doing everything they could and were greatly overstretched. But the BIG mistake that BA made was to imagine that passengers - who pay their wages - were of such little importance as to be totally ignored.
They seem to have learned nothing.
