Share your BA shut-down experiences …. and BA adds £16 to Expedia etc bookings

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• Derek Scott says:

  28 May28 May 08:34

  Interesting to read people’s perspectives. Having worked in customer-facing sectors for 30+ years, I have a view on how it was all portrayed across the media yesterday:

  The News Channels were keen to pounce on any whiff of lack of communication. I think it’s reasonable to assume that would have been easy, considering the disappointment/frustration factor that would have been strong in the terminal.

  Communications are never as good as you’d like, even when things are going well, so let’s be honest, BA were never going to be able to achieve a good outcome on this front. It’s easy to criticise, but put yourself in the staff’s position: a massive number of staff across an expansive estate, faced with 000’s of angry/frustrated passengers and a very fluid situation that could change quickly. The logistics alone are complex.

  Getting clear and definitive updates to all staff, to convey to passengers would have been extremely difficult, and potentially upsetting to some staff, let alone passengers.

  To say there was no Crisis Management Plan, I feel is extremely unfair. How would your company cope if they had the same set of circumstances? Of course you can bet there will be a huge post-Mortem on all fronts in the coming weeks, which hopefully will allow the Execs to revisit past/present/future plans and make significant improvements.

  I am due to fly to HKG on Wednesday with an overnight stop at LHR in Tuesday, and am comfortable BA will be doing all it can in the coming days. I’m a firm believer that no-one goes to work with the intention of doing a bad job, and as such, I have confidence that BA staff and crew will do their utmost in their control to make things right as quickly as possible

  • Alan says:

    28 May28 May 09:12

    Although they missed obvious opportunities too – the BA website (hosted on a totally separate system) didn’t say a thing about it on the front page when I looked yesterday – they could easily have put it into an emergency mode with all key info and status updates that pax required being readily available.

  • Mark says:

    28 May28 May 09:12

    What world do you live in!?

    I run a small business and I have backups for everything. Internet, servers, payment systems, phones, power.

    And any company that doesn’t deserves everything they get when things like this go wrong.

    It was like the time when Barclays payments went down a few years ago on the busiest Saturday of the year and all these companies moaned that they couldn’t take any money as they couldn’t accept cards etc, complaining that they lost tens of thousands. We’ll unless every payment method went down I’d have still been taking cards as I have simple redundancy in place!

  • CV3V says:

    28 May28 May 09:13

    Your are very generous to BA. Agreed nobody goes to work to do a bad job, but with BA its clear that there is a management culture to go to work and see how they can keep cutting costs and test how far they can go before too much bad PR and loss of revenue affects profits.

    How would my company respond in same set of circumstances? Well, if my office (and servers) burned down, we would move the same/next day to another office where a backup server is kept – and more importantly, paid for. The backup server could be switched to almost immediately. BA couldn’t even get a message on the BA website home screen.

    Also, it seems BA didn’t know what to do, they hadnt correctly planned for this event, which they should have done. They gave out mixed messages to customers ranging from ‘we will pay if you book with someone else’, ‘we won’t pay if you rebook with someone else, but will refund your ticket cost’ and ‘claim on your travel insurance’. Thats not a fluid situation, they should have a standard, prepared response.

    Where was the oneworld alliance? Why could a passenger not take their booking reference to another oneworld airline and get on a different flight to the same location? The scale of the problem would have been sharply reduced. Someone going to europe? put them on Eurostar. BA won’t pay for it? It makes train companies bus replacement approach look good!

    When then inquiry starts. Could it have been avoided? Could it have been handled better? Will this cost BA millions of pounds (IAG share price, compensation claims, lost future bookings?), yes.

    There were still thousands of people flying yesterday on other airlines, many on cheaper tickets (easyjet from LGW etc) who probably felt a mix of relief and vindication for not choosing BA.

    Crisis management should include for the worst case scenario, and the potential for it to occur (risk assessment) and then mitigated against. Yesterday was an epic fail. It is only fortunate they got the systems back up for today.

  • Aliks says:

    28 May28 May 09:47

    I think you hit the nail on the head with the Crisis Management Plan.

    Back in the 90s when I was doing business with BA IT, they would tell me that all the disaster recovery funding went to engineering. BA were proud that they could keep running through fog, breakdown of mechanical parts etc. They had fallback plans for all everything they could reasonably expect.

    Alas IT is at the back of the queue for management attention, and proper Crisis Management, and reasonably foreseeable events are not covered.

    • Jon says:

      29 May29 May 03:24

      Not long ago I was astonished that Malaysia Airlines, who are the process of switching to a new IT system, rolled out a website update that resulted in online booking becoming unavailable to anyone using a Safari-based browser (so iPad, iPhone etc). For about three weeks… I hate to think what that may have cost in lost bookings. They’ve since fixed that, although the new site only offers online booking and check-in to Safari users, no other content or functionality. The new back-end goes live on June 10th apparently – could be ‘interesting’. That a major airline could roll out a key business system without (I can only assume) properly testing it, and then for weeks fail to either fix it or roll it back, astonished me. Then BA’s meltdown happened… What is it with airlines and IT?! I know these are big, complex operations, and some IT failures are forgivable, but on the face of it, these appear both to be basic errors. Will be very interesting to see what comes out of BA’s post-mortem (if it’s ever made public, of course).

  • Michael says:

    28 May28 May 10:05

    Derek – I hate the throw the you weren’t there at you. Never mind communicating to staff. A brand new terminal with a tanoy system that was only used to broadcast the odd apology and security message at an inaudible level. It’s never the individual customer facing staff of course

  • 1nfrequent says:

    30 May30 May 12:40

    “To say there was no Crisis Management Plan, I feel is extremely unfair. How would your company cope if they had the same set of circumstances?”

    My company (which is by no means perfect) runs a crisis management exercise every year so it can test and improve its Business Continuity Plan and the exercise always includes an element where there’s an IT failure. As such, while you can’t be prepared for every eventuality, the senior management team are familiar enough with the BCP to be able to immediately implement it and start working their way through the problem rather than undergo BA’s bunny in the headlights approach.

    A big part of that BCP strategy, BTW, is to have a comms strategy in place. Everyone gets that a company won’t be able to give chapter and verse, but it’s straight forward enough to be able to say that there is a problem, there are numbers/social media accounts you can contact to try and rebook etc and then information updates on line and in real time as and when new points come in. It’s really not rocket science and given BA has been through IT issues before, the response should have been a hell of a lot slicker than it was.

    I really feel for BA’s front line staff – they were utterly shafted by an incompetent, cowardly senior management team.

    1F

• Steve says:

  28 May28 May 08:40

  Had a return points booking made using with Avios and companion voucher. When found out flights were cancelled yesterday booked another airline last minute.

  I want to use my BA booking for the return leg, but seeing as not flown the outbound with them will this be an issue?

  Had no joy trying to call them.

  • John says:

    28 May28 May 10:11

    It will be an issue but call them on Monday when things have calmed down

    • Julian says:

      28 May28 May 11:05

      You honestly think things will have calmed down on Monday?!! I would imagine their call centres will be in meltdown for several weeks after this incident. But it could all be avoided if they provided a way for customers to rebook their flight online in these circumstances.

• Patrick says:

  28 May28 May 08:47

  Just wonder how much this will cost BA in compensation claims…. Maybe more cuts will be needed to pay for it?

  • TripRep says:

    28 May28 May 08:55

    If they are on the hook for EU261/2004, it would be millions. If everyone claimed maybe upto £100 Million GBP. ???

    • Sam Redfern says:

      28 May28 May 09:00

      300 cancelled flights yesterday in total. Average it to 200 pax per flight (yes some are more and some are less) and take the middling €400 mid haul compensation level.. racks up to just short of £21m in just EU261 claims. Let alone accommodation, rebooking, sustenance and clothing for the lost bags.

      • TripRep says:

        28 May28 May 09:28

        And how many mote flights delayed over this period that will also be liable for EU261/2004.?

      • Lewis says:

        28 May28 May 09:44

        Also to add to that all the empty flights they sent out last night to get pax for the return flights this morning.

    • Mark says:

      28 May28 May 09:19

      I bet the £100 million, or any other possible loss, wasnt included in the cost benefit analysis for outsourcing. How many companies have outsourced and regretted it? eg Sainsburys with their IT fifteen years ago left the same people doing the same roles but working for the outsourcer, but where they used to be paid £50,000, they were now costing Sainsburys £500,000.

      Many customer service roles now outsourced to places like India are coming back now the wages there have been catching up with those here, with 10-15% wage inflation for over ten years.

      The outsourcers staff have allegiance to the outsource firm, not to the company who has outsourced. Thats the problem.

  • CV3V says:

    28 May28 May 09:20

    There is also Monday’s hit on the IAG share price to take into account, the loss of bookings on Saturday with the website being down most of the day, and the loss of confidence and people booking with other less risky airlines. I think Mr Cruz won’t be getting his bonus again.

    Years ago before the BA strikes started i almost booked a flight to Oz with BA as it was the cheapest option, after a friend (BA crew member!) advised me not to do it the BA crew were likely to go on strike and i paid more to fly with Emirates. BA went on strike as predicted, and i flew with Emirates and got Silver status which then kept me flying with them in preference to BA.

    • Lady London says:

      28 May28 May 14:39

      Cruz would be easy to sacrifice officially on the basis of this. Even though the roots of this are probably in outsourcing errors sanctioned by his predecessor.

      Why any business would outsource their key systems….#Really?

      The current business mania for outsourcing even core systems and ops has got to stop.
      This time it’s gone too far and British Airways will have lost its customers’ respect.

• Sam Redfern says:

  28 May28 May 08:58

  Due to fly out to Bahrain yesterday on BA. All know what happened.
  The BA staff I interacted with in Galleries First were all professional and under immense strain considering all of their normal resultion channels were cut off. The larger issues were with HAL and Border Control and the inflexibility of their processes to deal with situations like this.

  TA managed to get me a seat on QR in the evening. 13 hours in total at LHR, silver lining… the MH F lounge is rather nice, certainly gives GF a run for its money.

  Now in Bahrain and hoping to get my luggage soon, as I need to fly on to Chicago on Tuesday…

  • JP says:

    28 May28 May 11:06

    are we allowed to ask…..your trip, work or pleasure?

• Iain Chalmers says:

  28 May28 May 08:58

  We were in Houston due on the BA196 out at 8:25pm. We had a call saying we’d been moved to 194 departing slightly late at 5:30. Perfect service from our perspective but appreciate the F seats and GCH bumped us up the list I’m sure.

• Ben says:

  28 May28 May 09:04

  Fairly lucky I suppose. Flew BA cityflyer BHX-IBZ last night, flight delayed 2h45 so didn’t make it here until 5am but at least we made it. Pleased to get my free g+t on cityflyer at least!

• Henry Young says:

  28 May28 May 09:04

  It beats me why anyone flies BA. I have avoided them like the plague for 20 years. The perpetual way between staff and management has distracted both sides from actually delivering good service and running an effective airline. There are alternatives for practically every route, and I have always taken alternatives what ever the price. Even when cheaper, this and the many prior events demonstrate the false economy. BA would be best off simply giving up and ceding its slots to firms who can actually operate airlines.

  • Julian says:

    28 May28 May 11:13

    Are you honestly saying that you would prefer to travel on Easyjet or Ryanair in preference to BA??!!!

    • CV3V says:

      28 May28 May 12:52

      Short haul domestic, or europe, my preference is for Easyjet or Ryanair. No question about it, and thats with oneworld status. Flights are much cheaper, options such as speedy boarding work well (and far better than BA priority boarding) and i avoid the delays of using Heathrow.

      • Ro says:

        28 May28 May 14:01

        Couldn’t agree more. Absolute no benefit to flying BA for short haul except for a couple status credits, which is completely offset by the increased cost.

        • Genghis says:

          29 May29 May 07:12

          +1 I prefer Easyjet around Europe for work and pleasure. And LGW is much quicker for me to get to

• David says:

  28 May28 May 09:14

  Mixed experience for me.

  I was supposed to fly on the 07:55 from JFK to LHR yesterday, and would’ve then flown Ryanair STN to TXL early this morning. The delays meant I would’ve missed the flight out of STN had I taken any of the evening flights from JFK, which all fly overnight.

  I must applaud the BA counter staff at JFK – especially the manager who came in on his day off – for taking a very human approach to my particular challenge and rebooking me onto a flight with another One World carrier direct to TXL. Although technically my BA contract was only about travel from JFK to LHR (and that was exactly the ‘computer says no’ response I got from the call centre) the staff on the ground saw the bigger picture. Under the circumstances this was absolutely the right customer service oriented solution. Although I’m now exhausted from having been awake since 4:30am Saturday, I’m where I should be at a similar time to when I expected, and have avoided a massive faff to change the second flight and then attempt to claim it back and/or seek compensation.

  When I left the counters at JFK the manager was busy arranging for any passenger wanting to fly back to LON yesterday evening to board one of the two American Airlines flights due out. Great work from him, which has probably avoided a torrent of angry complaints and retained some goodwill.

  On the downside, I also suffered from a lack of information and communication at the beginning of the day, which was not just a bit rubbish but also quite unsettling. I agree BA need better contingencies and back ups.

  Also, when incidents like this happen protocols agreed in advance should simply be activated so it isn’t pot luck who you speak to at a call centre or whether you get a kind-hearted member of ground staff that dictates how customers are treated. I was lucky this time, but others less so, and I don’t feel all that confident I would be again(!)

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