On an afternoon flight from ATH today, the whole experience was very very poor and pretty sad to watch.
Was sat in exit row 11, 5 rows behind the back of CE. The machines seemed to be playing up and lots of questions from passengers, meaning it took 45 minutes to process the first 5 rows.
By the time they got to me there was no sandwiches or chicken salad left. The person in front of me bought the last sandwich, and then their card got declined as the machine was not working. The crew took the sandwich off the passenger who then went a bit crazy. Then another passenger piped up saying it was disgraceful. Poor cabin crew looked mortified. The crew told the annoyed passengers to email Willy Walsh or Alex Cruz to which one passenger laughed and said that would be about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
I bought some water and this resulted in the payment device having to go to me for pin then back to crew. I waited for payment to be approved before opening the water in case I had to give it back 😕
By 2.5 hours into the flight the crew had only got to row 13. The CSD made an announcement that there was a new system in place and it had teethingnissues and asking for everyone's patience and understanding.
By the time we were crossing the coast of France the crew had got to row 20.
Throughout the flight nobody in Y could get to the toilet at the back of the plane resulting in everyone using the CE toilet. So a knock on effect for the folks in club as a result of buy on board.
Towards the end of the flight the CSD came on the speakers again and apologised for the problems, clarified she had not been given authority to do any service recovery, but advised customers to go to BA.com and log a call with customer relations if they felt that their expectations were not met on the flight. At the end of the flight the captain apologised also and made similar announcement.
My takeaways:
- stock management is poor. Running out of sandwiches 4 rows into a 4 hour flight is bad. Yes I know it is day 1 but surely people have been working on planning stock needed? Is hardly rocket science and easyJet and other airlines have this working for years
- the payment technology hasn't been tested. Why not use contactless or just swipe as per in flights in the US. Having my to enter pin and hand the device over to each passenger will take ages. Also it seems 1 machine broke down but there was no spare. Basic stuff to fix here.
- crew morale will be impacted even more than already. The crew looked like stooges basically
All up, it's a bad idea poorly implemented. As a minimum, this should have been piloted in small scale to fix the technology issues.
Am so glad I work at a company where the management are pretty competent and not making the dumb decisions BA managers are!! These guys are running the airline into the depths of bad quality experience on every level. Hardly what you would expect from 'the worlds favourite airline'.
Will write to CR on this one. Expecting zero response but this is the worst situation I've ever seen crew have to put up with. Feel so bad for them.
Mr Cruz, please go away and find another job somewhere.