BA - You Need to Seriously Rethink Your IROPs handling
Finally sitting in the lounge trying to get to BOS and couldn't be more disappointed with BA's handling of IROPs. Now, I understand that yesterday saw a lot of delays and a lot of misconnects to deal with, but my measure of an airline is whether I can trust them to manage problems that do arise. BA failed badly on this count - the worst performance from any airline that I have ever experienced.
It shouldn't involve going to 7 different agents, phoning the US, and 5 to 6 hours spread over 2 days to simply get rebooked. And the first 6 agents should put in the sort of effort that the 7th did to try and make things right. And I was lucky - I have a gold card. Everyone else was waiting in lines so long that I wonder how they managed to stay upright.
What is truly amazing is that I even needed to be rebooked! Why does BA need me to tell them that, no, I don't want to take up residence in London and, yes, I would like to be rebooked on the next available flight? Really? You need me to stand in multiple lines to deliver this message? Just rebook me behind the scenes and save your staff the headache.
Since I would like to not have this happen again, I'll give BA one simple piece of advice: don't willfully misallocate your staff in times of massive IROPs. I understand that there were a lot of folks to accommodate, but at least pretend you are putting in the effort to manage the situation. It was clear to anyone watching that you were under allocating staff toward fixing the problem. BA had 7 people manning the F check-in desks, working at less than 10% utilization and leaving 2 agents to sort through the real heavy lifting for every Club, F, and BAEC cardholder caught out last night and today. In what universe is that the right thing to do? I know that you don't want to steal from Peter to pay Paul, but taking 2 from the F desk to the service desk would have done wonders and not impacted performance. Empower your floor managers to adapt to the situation.
I'm not going to trot out the time-honored tradition of swearing off BA forever, but I will book them again warily, knowing how badly things can go wrong and that management simply doesn't care. They don't care about the passengers inconvenienced and they really don't care about the handful of staff they throw into the fray without proper support to try and do what they can.