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@marks7389 – the Virgin executive team, the Chief Customer Officer and his no.2 charged with communicating the original cancellations were certainly not “good at sorting out the mess” after cancellation of the São Paulo, Hong Kong and Shanghai routes. They behaved appallingly and simply refunded lots of passengers before grudgingly, and after ten days and much external pressure (including from the CAA) rerouting with other airlines or telling passengers to do it themselves.
CAA has the authority to enforce under national law, but not issue a penalty (other than withdrawal of licence I guess). They also don’t deal much with individual cases. In the Wizzair case for example they only enforced the payment of claims since 2022, but nothing as an extra compensation or penalty.
Indeed, the CAA doesn’t get involved in individual cases as there are good official routes for passengers to address issues – ADR and MCOL which can both impose decisions on airlines. The CAA also does not have proper powers (although the CMA does) to enforce non-compliance and has a conflicting remit. It was only able to act against Wizz because of the unpaid judgments potentially putting at risk the airline’s licence. The reality is that most NEBs don’t bring airlines to heel on 261 issues, and some actively protect airlines.
@marks7389 – the Virgin executive team, the Chief Customer Officer and his no.2 charged with communicating the original cancellations were certainly not “good at sorting out the mess” after cancellation of the São Paulo, Hong Kong and Shanghai routes. They behaved appallingly and simply refunded lots of passengers before grudgingly, and after ten days and much external pressure (including from the CAA) rerouting with other airlines or telling passengers to do it themselves.
@JDB – just going by personal experience here, and to be clear I’m talking about the team of assistants who respond to Shai Weiss’s emails, not the Execs themselves. I’ve had plenty of dealings with them in recent years as, between COVID rebooking screw-ups, cancellation and general process failings every booking we’ve made has needed some kind of escalation. Credit where its due, I have found them to be great – but was not caught up in the wholesale route bookings sagas.It shouldn’t need Exec level escalations of course, and for everyone out there who hasn’t worked out how to get things fixed where the normal customer service routes lead to dead ends there must be quite a few p****d off customers.
What both the VS and BA route cancellations shows is the total lack of thinking of those in decision making positions and an apparent lack of consideration for those in the doing the work positions.
Clearly what should have happened is that the rebooking arrangements should have been in place BEFORE any cancellation notifications were sent out.
Not doing that meant call centre agents followed the usual rebooking procedures as though a single flight had been cancelled rather than a whole slew of them.
This then meant passengers were given incorrect advice and thus made bad decisions.
It’s also clear that not all agents were made fully aware of the additional rebooking options which again led to frustrated passengers making bad decisions.
Management should really learn from this and do a better job in future. But I doubt they will.
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