T8191

Twittering is one thing, Fixing is different!

paulwuk

While I sympathise with the Ba staff at the coal face pointing out its swissport, it's Ba's responsibility, and fault. While someone took a large bonus for getting such a great deal outsourcing to swissport, the flip side of he coin is now apparent.

Reports that other airlines like easyjet get a better response may be related to the fact they pay more for a good service?

In the long run I don't care who runs Ba's cabin crews, baggage, checkin, lounges, or maintenance. I just care that a good job is done, and in my experience outsourcing of most things always results in worse service, and higher costs. Office cleaning is one area that seems to be generic enough, unskilled enough, and easy enough to manage.

corporate-wage-slave

Easyjet use Menzies, and they are by far Menzies' biggest client. Menzies simply can't afford to get that one wrong.

The airlines with the greatest problems at the moment are Thomson and Monarch, since they have tight turnarounds and significant checked baggage in terms of quantity, as well as some fairly large aircraft. A number of services could not take off purely because the luggage from the previous service had not been offloaded.

tuff

HBO this weekend methinks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/avia...t-luggage.html

oxtailsoup

We are still waiting for our luggage to be delivered from last weekend. I'm also still waiting for a response from the Customer Relations team to my complaint.

The last few months have not been a wonderful experience with BA tbh.

Howard Long

That's pretty much my opinion too. Change for the sake of change, and lining someone's pocket who'll be long gone when the sh!t hits the fan. Preceded of course by a few spreadsheets and Powerpoint meetings containing TLAs like ROI and TCO, supported by a bunch of unprovable finger-in-the-air figures. Personally I think that there should be clawback as part of the project engagement if it fails to deliver.

While outsourcing can work in certain scenarios, for several years it's been turned into money for old rope for some. I say that as someone who's worked on both sides of the outsourcery fence for twenty years.

One reason that BA may be suffering more than others is that if Swissport have already failed in their SLA to BA for the period, and therefore already have a financial hit, they may still be within SLA to other airlines, so will concentrate to try to keep those other SLAs above the waterline, and just give up with BA.

A P Yu

It was on the news this morning that Swissport had kept costs low by employing the new folk for the peak period on zero hours contracts (where no hours are guaranteed - and they are offered hours when Swissport need them). Swissport assumed they would all gladly take the work when offered, but too many of them are saying no to the shifts offered, particularly those at unfriendly hours - I bet the good weather isn't helping too.

This will drive more and more people to go Hand Baggage Only and add to the scrum for overhead locker space. The race to the bottom continues.

V10

I've also seen the zero-hours contracts stated elsewhere.

That being the case it's not really surprising that there are problems. It strikes me as rather cavalier to have so much depending on assumptions about the availability of staff with little incentive to dig you out of a hole.

corporate-wage-slave

Thanks for this link, typically an article like this create waves, it had an interesting amount of details, so my suspicion is the the LGW press office dug out the dirt on Swissport. I had heard rumours of Monarch terminating, and there's a top secret project in Thomson looking to in-source handling too. I've not heard anything from BA other than that frontline staff are no longer (if they ever did) justifying the status quo. Thomson are facing unexpected extra costs from delayed and cancelled services and their margins are wafer thin - some services could not depart because the inbound baggage was still in the hold from the previous flight. However outsourcing is relatively quick, in-sourcing is relatively slow unless you can TUPE. Menzies, who have been spared most of this, are reluctant to take on another big customer too.

Indeed. Leaving aside the moral issues of zero hours contracts - and I've no objection to them if there's a bunch of students who can make good use of them - whoever thought of using zero hour contracts in an area with almost no unemployment and pulling out of recession, along with a 3 month lead time to get replacement staff, deserves castration to avoid further damage to the gene pool. Swissport are now flying in staff from other airports to help out LGW.

techie

The extent to which BA is being short-sighted continues to astound me. They naively believed promises from a company that they could deliver the same quality of service for less and now that they have made their bed, they need to sleep in it. These are your planes, your crew, your passengers, so it should be your baggage handlers who take care of people's possessions.

Personally, I would not be against raising my flight fare by a few quid knowing that I would get my bags treated well and onto/off the plane promptly. It shouldn't be necessary, but it's better than not having bags at the start of a holiday.

cosmo74

Everyone's favourite paper, the Daily Mail, is also reporting on the Swissport fiasco today, and using it as an excuse to knock zero hours contracts (although they may have a point in this case): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-handlers.html

A comment from BA states: ''We have been given no reason to expect any issues this weekend at Gatwick, either from the airport authority or Swissport. We will continue to work with Swissport to improve the levels of service to our customers.'

origin

I am not sure that the zero hours contracts where the main issue. I have noticed some managers have left earlier in the month or late last month. Zero hours work fine if they are understood, it appears the past few weeks they haven't worked at all.

Its such a shame, in the end the customer and the people who want to work well are hurt the most.

ACARS

The airlines are not blameless here. They all no doubt chose the cheapest tender to provide them with handling services. Swissport want a viable product and need to reduce costs by using zero hours workers. It isn't rocket science. Albeit the airline want passengers to believe it is. If Swissport didn't offer the cheapest tender, one of the other handling companies would have done and would also be in the proverbial.

I have no doubt that Gatwick has a service level agreement in place with handlers (time allowable from parked to last bags on belt) but it does little to encourage them to up their game, which would of course induce cost. Swissport simply won't do it and clearly would rather weather the storm.

It isn't the first time this has happened at Gatwick and it won't be the last.

Swissport have been rubbish for years. I remember arriving in 2005 from a VS flight a waited for 3.5 hours for first bags. The rest of my tribe were home and in bed by that point.

Kgmm77

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Good to see Monarch grabbing the bull by the horns and terminating Swissports contract.

tuff

Monarch has sacked Swissport.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28580439