It may no longer be cool to say that, in business, there are no problems, just opportunities. But for British Airways, it seems there are just problems.
Sadly, when you spend a little bit of time on trying to unpick Unite’s threatened 12-day strike this Christmas, whoever your airline favourites are, you can start to have a whole lot of sympathy for BA.
Take BA’s cabin crew salaries: they’re pretty much at the top end of the industry spectrum. Published figures show short haul cabin crew of medium years’ service get c.£18k base which, with allowances, totals about £35k pa. Senior cabin crew members on long haul flights make about £56k. Indeed, BA spends twice as much on average per cabin attendant as does Virgin Atlantic. Is that so bad that they have to wreak their anger on one million paying customers (that includes me) this year?
BA struggles, as an established airline, because of its long-standing network of union agreements. Newer, low-cost providers on the runway don’t carry such heavy baggage; consequently their room for manouevre is much greater.
BA even has a disruption agreement which means that cabin crew have the right, as I understand it, to two consecutive nights off. So in one case earlier this year, BA cabin crew decided, after only one night’s rest at a location in Scotland, not to crew a return flight. BA’s archaic working practices meant stranded passengers had to booked on to alternative flights while the pilots flew the original aircraft – empty – back to Heathrow.
Bravo Lima Oscar Oscar Delta Yankee Hotel Echo Lima Lima!
OK, so what is BA doing about it? It’s known the possibility of a strike has existed since 2nd November. It has about one million customers to please as well as countless of millions of eyeballs following around the globe. It may be a problem from hell but it’s also an opportunity — if not from heaven, then certainly from Unite — to be able to show the world how it can mount and manage a professional response. In this way it can win sympathy and even support for its actions. Dare I say this might even lead to such public anger that Unite — as with the MPs expenses’ scandal — would be shamed into dropping its carefully designed plans to cause maximum public harm.
Pie in the skies. Look at BA’s website and there’s a dialogue box which, when clicked, devoted about 50 functional words on how to make sure you manage your account so as BA can keep you informed. And that’s it…no news, no updates, no comments, no live feeds, no BA strong point of view, no feeling of “we’re trying our very best to help you, our customers and visitors, during this difficult time.”
They could have cleaned up! Everyone but everyone will be visiting BA’s website, hungry for information, checking their flights, desperate for some sort of helpful advice. Indeed, instead of being in the gutter of having to deal with hacked off customers, they could be in the starry position of informing and helping and making all sorts of symapathetic noises and suggestions that would have made this customer, at least, think “Well, they are trying to make the best of this.”
But they’re not. BA’s website is simply a barely functional, passive, unimaginative, one-dimensional, poster site. A bit like the monitors above the check-in desks that in this era of global connectedness seem able to show only a flight number and boarding time with no related information whatsoever.
Poor BA. Not guilty of the strike but very guilty of not being able to exploit the communications possibilites that, being in the spotlight, could have been jumbo-sized.
Whoever manages your website communications, Mr Walsh, why don’t you ask them to talk to us! The opportunity still exists to remove a heck of a lot of the problems.
And even if the strike is put on hold today as a result of your high court action, carry on being nice and helpful to customers anyway: you’re going to need them firmly on board for the future as the recession’s not over yet.
