A few PR thoughts on the BA system outage

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• James P says:

  30 May30 May 10:19

  ‘Trivial and petty’ absolutely sums up BA’s attitude to me. My issue: I was due to fly Heathrow to Dublin on Sunday, then back-to-back immediately to return to Heathrow and then connect on to the US. LHR-DUB and DUB-LHR-US were two separate bookings. BA cancelled my LHR-DUB on Sunday but not the DUB-LHR which would normally be the same plane return leg (presumably the aircraft schedule was completely messed up).

  BA point-blank refused to protect the remainder of my US ticket if I was to (inevitably) miss the DUB-LHR part, despite this wholly being caused by their IT issues. Result: my travel agent and I clogged up BA’s phone lines for hours on Sunday afternoon looking at alternatives, I was forced to move my booking to today (Tuesday) and have lost a day of my US trip, and they’ve effectively used up several Dublin seats that I didn’t really need that could have been allocated to a stranded passenger.

  All they needed to do was show a bit of sense on Sunday and protect my booking in the exceptional circumstances. Petty, petty, petty.

  • bill says:

    30 May30 May 13:37

    wow that is awful

  • JamesW says:

    30 May30 May 15:07

    That is totally ridiculous.

• Mark says:

  30 May30 May 10:24

  From memory, EU261 extraordinary circumstance was stated by the court as something like a recall of that model of aeroplane by the manufacturer. Or things like the national grid is down. Or the runway has sunk. Could they have avoided this? If its a power supply problem, then yes, you put the backup systems on a different power supply. Redundant power, redundant data, redundant network, redundant servers. Its not rocket science, although its more expensive than not doing so….except when you have a £100m bill to pay, in which case the redundancy is seen as cheap.

• ex-BA says:

  30 May30 May 10:25

  As a former resident of Waterside I can tell you that reports in the media pinning the blame on Indian out-sourcing are nearly right, although the devil is in the detail and the issues are more subtle than are being made out.

  Indian sub-contractors have been working in BA IT for years, literally flown in by a large Indian multinational I won’t name (Google it). There are a few good eggs but the overwhelming majority are rubbish, utterly out of their depth and simply lacking knowledge, experience or basic technical sense.

  But they are cheap. And in an organisation like BA where colleagues just keep their head down and independent thinking is actively discouraged, no-one wanted to be the one to say “senior managers / directors have got this badly wrong.”

  I left around the first wave of IT redundancies and there have been many more since. IT as a department (for want of a better word) is a shadow of its former self. BA seems to think that it should focus more on aircraft and less on computers but at the moment it is doing neither because it simply takes the lowest bid for both.

  Alex Cruz is getting the blame because he’s in charge now but in reality he took an existing policy and simply expanded it. He could have stopped it of course but the seeds of this failure were sown before IAG existed. What he’s done is pushed on with minimal expenditure in the sort of short-termism of which the City was accused a decade ago.

  Frankly, I believe that the only thing keeping the airline going are the engineering and pax-facing colleagues. There are deep and fundamental problems in every back-office level of British Airways. It’s going to need a senior director of talent and experience to fix these. Moreover, that person will need to operate with considerable freedom from the IAG board who are so focused on the bigger picture they seem to have forgotten that the component airlines even exist.

• Tim says:

  30 May30 May 10:40

  A couple of months back Virgin Trains had a similar problem you may recall when a fire on the trackside stopped all trains leaving EUS.

  Different transport network, different rules of course but the way Virgin handled the issue which was out of their hands (like BA alledegedly) was incomparable. Free water, snacks and the conductor coming through the carriage following an announcement he made where he said “…if all you want to do is shout at me and vent your frustration then go ahead it’s been a difficult day.” Of course no one did as the communication was enough to settle people.

  Anyway, it may all be pointless moaning about this as if jezzer gets voted on BA will likely be nationlised by the end of the year..!

  • Rob says:

    30 May30 May 10:51

    Worth noting that when I was on a delayed Virgin train last year, there were tannoy announcements specifically reminding us that we were all due a ‘no questions asked’ 50% refund.

    • Alan says:

      30 May30 May 17:26

      Yep, same for me with train to York. They got us all onto a new train, apologised for the over-crowding (having combined two trains), switched WiFi to free-for-everyone and made multiple tannoy announcements apologising, clarifying situation, reminding about delay-repay and handing out cards to help claim. Superbly handled and lots of very satisfied customers as a result.

  • Ro says:

    30 May30 May 17:27

    I was returning from edinburgh in october when the whole east coast lane south of yorkshire (i think) went down. It was an absolute disaster and the communication was awful, with contradictory annoucements every few minutes or with different staff. Tbh it was utter chaos.

    What virgin did do well, as Rob mentions above, is clearly inform people of their refund rights and how to do it. When i eventually arrived in Kings X 6h later there were staff handing out cards to every passenger further detailing the claims process.

    • Ro says:

      30 May30 May 17:28

      Should be east coast line

• Michele says:

  30 May30 May 09:43

  I don’t just think that cost cutting is the issue, as Rob rightly said it was the lack of preparedness. Plus a total lack of leadership. There will always be a bit of making it up as you go along in major situations but this was a whole new level of headless chickens. When I worked for a major part of the UK’s travel infrastructure, we regularly held management team exercises for a total loss of IT including how to deal with press. All the front line staff also practised regularly for major events. How is it that BA can’t manage to deal with something that should not be unexpected. A cyber attack would have had a similar effect. Surely every airline practises for such things and has contingency checklists, procedures etc? None of the staff seemed to know what they were supposed to do and were giving out conflicting information.

• Tony says:

  30 May30 May 10:47

  If there was anything positive to come out of Saturday’s fiasco I would have to say it was the attitude of the BA staff. All the frontline staff that my wife and I encountered at T5 were doing their absolute best in torrid conditions and let’s face it, they were left high and dry just as much as the travelling public.

  I was fortunate enough to get through to the BA call centre on Sunday morning at 0630h to re-book our flight to BKK later that day and the lady was extremely apologetic and humble and sorted out our re-booking within minutes.

  There was a further issue when we went to check-in at T5 as I couldn’t check-in via the app for love nor money. A manager was eventually called over and she sorted the issue whilst being very friendly and engaged us with small talk about her love of holidaying in Thailand whilst being sincerely apologetic for the inconvenience caused.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the BA staff don’t look elsewhere for employment in the not too distant future after the way they were also abandoned by BA management.

• CV3V says:

  30 May30 May 10:54

  Too many bad points to go through, it shows a company not functioning well at any level (excluding the suffering cabin crew, many of whom were working and did their best to try and help)

  Cruz’ email to staff telling them to either help out or shut up – it’s a sign of bad management. When a company is in trouble you hope that everyone will pitch in. I think the lower ranks within BA (who are also their best staff) decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to go pitch in at the airport and suffer the abuse whilst management hid.

  Complete lack of anyone (Cruz et al) willing to take responsibility and constantly being on the defensive, which I think will come back and bite him. Shareholders, the CAA and whoever else really need to hold BA to account and avoid a cover up. In the last few weeks there have been various press articles about BA taking the cuts too far, how on earth can Cruz (and his team) survive this disaster.

  Planes not being able to get space at a gate and waiting hours on a plane. Accept the problem and send some of the flights to Stansted or Luton (at least then people could connect onwards with easyjet!).

  Sometimes in a bad situation the answer needs to be ‘throw money at it’, get people to their destination by any means and take the hit, and minimise the bad PR. Again, BA didn’t seem to want to do that. It could have helped save the day by getting people onto other airlines one way or another.

  Then I read about the passenger who shouted ‘Shame on BA’, BA staff called the police on him.

  • Tony says:

    30 May30 May 11:04

    Wasn’t there another story about an Italian BA employee threatening to call the police on a customer who had the temerity to ask about the procedure for people who couldn’t afford a hotel? If I was her manager I would have her sacked with immediate effect for gross misconduct.

    • Paul says:

      30 May30 May 11:46

      BA don’t employ staff overseas they are all agents working for handling agencies and have been for over a decade. They wear BA uniform but they don’t work for or get paid by BA.

      • Tony says:

        30 May30 May 13:11

        She should still be sacked, Paul. If you don’t know the answer to a question then pick up the phone and ask a superior. That’s professionalism. End of.

• John says:

  30 May30 May 11:23

  Quote from CAA website:

  Commenting on the delays and cancellations affecting British Airways passengers, Matt Buffey, Head of Consumer Protection at the Civil Aviation Authority, said:

  “Passengers affected by the disruption to British Airways’ flights are protected under EU law. The welfare of passengers must be the priority for any airline experiencing disruption and we fully expect all UK airlines to meet their obligations.

  Passengers who are currently caught up in this disruption should be informed of their legal rights by British Airways, but they can find out the full details of their rights during delays and cancellations by visiting the CAA website.”

  Based upon my experience of BA & EU 261 claims, I have no doubt that they will try to find a way to refuse or delay claims for this. I was told by a member of BA crew that BA actively try to put enough blockers and hurdles to wear down claimants, many of whom will just give up or accept BAs rejection. I would have like to have seen CAA coming out with something stronger e.g. IT failure is not an excemption. I suspect the UK parliament transport committee will have a hearing into BA and this mess.

  It’s another Ratner moment for Mr Cruz.

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