BingBongBoy

What an absolutely brilliant post. The only one really worth reading in this whole thread. ^

HIDDY

I've posted several times to this thread so I'll get my coat then.

stephem

I believe OP flies DL quite a bit and probably has gotten used to what is arguably the best IRROPs handling around. This is particularly true of top tier DL fliers on paid business class tickets. I have had so many experiences like this, where my plane landed and I was already protected or rebooked. Sometimes on other carriers to ensure I wasn't delayed excessively. Delta really excels at this, and while I have never experienced it, I have heard UA does the same thing for its top tier fliers.

Non US carriers really don't do as well here, I sometimes feel as if it's a part of their business plan that they just never filled out. I've had terrible experiences with SQ and Cathay, where I was just thrown in with everyone else, with no real differentiation based on cabin or status (even as an SQ PPS) and had to look up flights and suggest options myself.

HIDDY

Probably swings and roundabouts.
In my experience BA and AF are very good at looking after everyone during such disruption and don't just concentrate on taking care of their elite customers. I know someone who when flying domestically with a major US airline had to sleep on the floor at the airport when they missed their connection due to weather...no overnight accommodation was provided.

dera

The most disgusting treatment, by a considerable margin, in case of irrops that ive experienced, were from DL and AC. DL left me to Paris, AC left me to sleep on the floor of LGA due to a "weather" cancellation.
BA have been excellent, every time.
As said, swings and roundabouts.

BOH

It would be an "absolutely brilliant post" - if it even remotely addressed what the thread had been discussing. You quoted a post by HIDDY but he has not suggested in any way that extra planes and crew are on standby for IROPS situations

I don't recall anyone else in this thread either suggesting BA have extra planes and flight crew on standby for IROPS situations. Pretty much all of the debate has been about consistently BA's poor show with regards to re-booking, lack of extra ticketing staff during IROPS, no automated rebooking and each pax unable to do any of the re-booking themselves - BA's solution is pretty much get pax to stand in a queue for hours because only a ticketing agent at LHR (or one at a call centre) can make any changes.

No one would seriously suggest any airline keeps planes and flight crew on standby just in case. And no one did - please keep up itsmeitiss and BingBongBoy

stephem

But careful not to take my quote without the full context. I was not referring to any scenario with any passenger. I agree anyone can come up with any number of customers who were left to sleep, hitchhike, walk, etc by any airline. My point was that DL does much more for top tier FFs in these situations than BA does for its Golds. I believe from the OPs posting history that he is at or close to top tier at DL as well as BA Gold and I was merely saying for that comparison he has a good point, DL does a better job of taking care of its Diamonds (and Platinums for that matter) than BA does for its Golds when things go wrong. I dislike DL for so many reasons, so it pains me to say it, but it's true in my experience too.

You only have to go far as looking at the hours that the BA Gold line operated and the fact that for those of us in the US it now rings through to somewhere in the world 24 hours a day. It was laughable that you couldnt get dedicated elite line support 24/7, at least to us in the US, because all of our domestic carriers did that for us. I believe this was a competitive reaction that BA had to take, as I had a long conversation with BA staff right around when the change was rolled out. I had just returned from an extended vacation with my family that had almost been marred by a codeshare ticketing error by BA. It required me to figure out what BA ticket office somewhere in the world (turned out it was India) was open, call them, spend an hour arguing with them to get them to fix some tickets and then sprint with my family of 5 to the gate to start a three week vacation on the other side of the earth. I was dumbfounded that there wasnt anyone at the BA Gold line to help fix what was a silly error that I had already been told had been corrected when I spotted it weeks before departure.

itsmeitisss

I wasn't disagreeing with Hiddy but adding to what he said. As to the talk about extra planes (and necessarily this means crew too) this always gets raised here in relation to irrops. Many irrops result in planes being out of position, and many times I have seen people saying here that BA should have spare capacity to deal with this.

Kgmm77

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A403 Safari/8536.25)

Of course all these issues exist, but as an customer, I don't pay an organisation to tell me it's problems or the many reasons why it can't do something. I pay it to deliver.

If that costs more, I'll assess that against the competition and general cost/benefit analysis.

I'm not in the business of running an airline and frankly I don't need to be. I'll judge it on the end product, just as my employers customers assess our end product.

Bluntly, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions.

itsmeitisss

Some of the airlines identified as providing what is described as better back up are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (AA for one). You need to remember that BA doesn't have this luxury. My point is that people want everything that they would get in an ideal world. Such a world does not exist.

Kgmm77

If other carriers can do it, it's not an ideal world.

By changing its business model over the last 10-15 years (this was BA's choice, nobody else's) to focus its ops at one of the worlds most constricted gateways, it's "normal" operations will be impacted more than its competitors.

If you willingly choose this business model, you need to have a stronger response to the inevitable operational issues or else BA's customers will suffer in such situations more than other airlines. IMO (and that of many, many others through the multiple periods of stress that occur every year) BA isn't good enough.

At the end of the day, the bottom line will dictate it. I get the impression BA has a strategy not of doing its best, but just enough not to materially damage the brand. Time will tell if that's enough.

BOH

The frustration as the paying passenger is there are clearly better ways of doing things as other airlines seem to cope much better through automated rebooking, smartphone technology - and a generally more proactive approach.

The redeployment of staff to more critical duties during IROPS is blindingly obvious as one of a number of solutions to assist in clearing the inevitable re-booking backlogs. I seriously don't buy all of this "yes, but check-in and ticketing applications use different systems" bollox - is anyone seriously saying that check-in and ticketing are so complex that no members of staff could possibly comprehend using these two different systems? When most other people that use IT related systems in their job quite regularly switch between applications that use different terminology and screen layouts?

Many applications in the safety critical world have strict rules that say staff should not switch between two different systems because of unfamiliarity issues that could result in mistakes. Examples are flight decks, signalling systems on the railway and control rooms in power stations and oil rigs. But ticketing and check-in systems??.....umm no.

I suspect not being able to re-deploy staff to cover disruptions and other problems is more about unions and a "that's not my job" mentality....staff still stuck in a 1970s mentality fuelled by the backing of a strong union. As someone else has rightly pointed out, resistance to change is more tricky to manage.....but it it doesn't mean there shouldn't be a plan to address it

kanderson1965

I see we are back to blame it on the workers again. These would be the workers that chose to implement two different systems for check-in/ ticketing?
Facts are the majority of problems in British Industry and commerce is due to inept management. The problem lies in the fact than anyone can become a manager regardless of any qualification or experience. Management is profession in itself and should be treat as such. If it not ok for workers to put self interest before the company neither is for the management. I have worked for organisations whose middle management have only been interested in making sure their bonuses have been met.

Staff development is a two way process, if you adopt the attitude that you want to "screw" as much out of the staff as possible, it will not be as effective as engaging the staff in the process. Managers are not more important than staff, they just perform a different job function; after all they are both employees.

It is interesting that SRB does not seem to to have these issues, is this because there is a culture of engagement at VS or do they employ people who are happy to be subservient?

Just for the record I am not a militant trade unionist (I can see the same problems within the unions in that the wrong type of people can end up leading them) but a professional engineer who struggles at times to convey to management that change is necessary.

BOH

I don't disagree with you, was not trying to "blame it on the workers" at all. Resistance to change is frequently due to fear and mistrust of management and also those fears being fuelled by union reps desperate to hang on to the membership dues that pay their salary. Agreed, engaging with and seeking views from all parties is normally the best way to get change.

kanderson1965

I agree with you points above especially with engagement. I think as well as a fear on the part of the workers, there is sometimes a fear on the part of management of empowering employees. I wish there was a way of taking self interest out of the workplace but I presume that would go against human nature.

I perhaps see management differently, in that I see management as people who enable me to do my job as effectively as possible.