Originally Posted by
BingBongBoy
Yes... You are.
Down route, WE as individual crew are not responsible for our own transport to the airport. The airline arranges our transport at a set time before the departure time of the flight. This varies from one out station to the next depending on distance to the hotel, local regular traffic problems and time that it takes to get through airport procedures etc... Hence, any delay to the crew getting to the flight at an out station really is out of their control.
When it is unacceptable is at home base when I as a crew member decide what time I leave for work and check in. But, at base it very very rarely causes a problem as that is when we have standby crew to utilize for such instances.
Of course I am going to defend the crew, who were most probably at no fault in any of this but seem to have become the main reason for the late running of the service in the eyes of people in this discussion. I have no problems defending the crew when they have not been proven to be at fault.
But remember, as a passenger it doesn't matter to me who is to blame if the crew are late. If the crew are late because of a failing of theirs, or if the crew are late because the station staff didn't arrange the pick up on time, or if the crew are late because the bus didn't arrive when it was meant to, it doesn't matter. The crew are late. That's (generally) unacceptable (absent meteors, plague, famine and the M23 being closed
). Yes, as a crew member, it's unfair for you to be blamed if it is not your responsibility. However saying that the crew being late is unacceptable is not necessarily blaming the crew, if the crew were not at fault. You seem to have assumed that saying it's unnacceptable for the crew to be late means there is an assumption that the crew are responsible. They may not be. Saying crew being late is unacceptable is setting an expectation of service, which BA corporately has to achieve, hopefully by working as a team to ensure it doesn't happen, without saying who may or may not be to blame.
It's like if I deliver a piece of work late to a client. Doesn't matter if it was my fault or my colleagues fault or a sub-contractor's fault. We were late. It's unfair to me if the client turns around and shouts at me if it wasn't my fault - but it's worse customer service for me to turn back and say 'well it wasn't me, it was that person over there', particularly when that person is also in my company, because as a company, we should be able to get our act together to deliver the work on time to the client. Instead we apologise, we review what went wrong, we may kick arse internally and make it clear if it was avoidable that that is not acceptable to the staff members concerned, but outwardly, we accept that we have inconvenienced the client and don't try to play the blame game with each other, because you can't do that in a professional environment.
Now, you aren't trying to do that at work, you are participating on a bulletin board. But it is frustrating for me to continually have you getting defensive when all I'm doing is laying out the expectations that I have of the standard of service I expect from airlines.
So if I've been reading too much into what you have been saying, you have also been reading way too much into what I've been saying, reading it as personal criticism of you and attribution of blame when it isn't. But hey, I guess you'll find something else to get defensive about in this post too...