Calchas

Secretsquirrel.return we are indebted to you for your insight into this from the Cabin Crew perspective. Thank you again for taking the time to post. I suspect that much of the anger and frustration is temporary, but I think now you mention it that unfortunately the crew-passenger dynamic will be permanently affected.

layz

You are right, I noticed the software was not very user friendly, they even make taking payment more difficult than it should be. I'd have expected a much more user friendly system, the key transactions could be streamlined and anything more advanced moved to an advanced section.

One person I saw tried to operate the ipad with a pen (a regular pen, not a dedicated stylus), I'm guessing the old machines were resistive touchscreen so they'd work with a pen. BA should offer a stylus to those who prefer it.

BA235

Indeed.

subject2load

Another superb contribution from Secretsquirrel.return

The discussion & debate here on FT surrounding the whole subject of BoB has been genuinely enriched (just managed to avoid using a similar word there !) by this detailed comment & perspective, offering insights we might not otherwise have had.

This fundamental change will - as correctly interpreted by Secretsquirrel.return - prove ultimately to have far wider implications than the cost of a cup of coffee or bacon roll.

South London Bon Viveur

I am far from being an apologist, but I would show the crew member some forbearance. Firstly, some crew are clearly stressed and overwhelmed, secondly there does seem to be some ambiguity in the instructions being given to them by management. Whereas some crew might have acted differently, it may be that this crew member thought she was merely following orders. Ultimately I see this as an inevitable consequence of the manner of implementation of BoB, and we all know where the blame for that lies.

South London Bon Viveur

That baby should definitely be named Alex

miamiflyer8

Coincidentally the family was Spanish and last name being Cruz.

Secretsquirrel.return

http://www.forbes.com/sites/douggoll.../#7776bfa9a8bb

http://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/20...drink-program/

And this now makes amusing reading now after the launch ......

http://mediacentre.britishairways.co...6/2016-72/7309

Safe flying

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me is not original I have used in memory of poster somewhere else who was a true hero to many at BA .
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The information posted here are my views and opinion . They do not reflect the official view or opinion or any other individual or company
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GentleGiant

I bet Andy Adcock @ marksandspencer.com - might want to know how is brand is being portrayed.

I believe most emails are [email protected]

unileeds

I am not sure why no one in the media has picked up on Alex Cruz's previous achievements.
1. Vueling- The company was threatened with removal of service from Barcelona airport in 2016 due to the number of delayed/cancelled flights, lying to customers about EC261 and ambitious expansion plans that meant they had over worked crews. This happened as Mr Cruz left for BA. The estimated compensation/fine Vueling was looking at was close to 4.5million-7 million euros, 10% of their operating income for 2015.

2. Gold Car- he was the advisor and on the board for Gold Car, a Spanish car rental company that has ONLY negative reviews and an appalling customer care record.

I am surprised, no one has gone down looking at his past and seeing the poor brands he has created. And, this is exactly what brand is being created here. I cannot see even one TECHNOLOGY innovation he talks about in any previous business.

Regarding growth of Vueling. Understand that Barcelona is a Tourist destination 9 months a year. Iberia and local monopoly meant that Barcelona airport would be under served by Iberia, as Iberia wanted Madrid and Aena who run both airports, wanted Madrid to be the main hub for travellers. You could literally put a fire breathing dragon to fly from Barcelona, and people would buy tickets. Vueling being successful from Barcelona is no big deal. It is struggling in pretty much any other territory.

Just saying, am I missing something here? Shouldn't people ask him about this?

corporate-wage-slave

Many thanks once again on your regular updates and I do hope you keep us posted, indeed it would be good if other Eurofleet/MF/LGW crews could give their perspective, if they are willing so to do. Your last sentence is the bit which I don't think BA have worked through, the difficulty in giving any customer service inflight unless it comes with a price tag - the previous offering, for all its faults at least gave a "welcome to BA" impression. I look forward to your next posting with interest Secretsquirrel.return!

corporate-wage-slave

If you don't mind, I'm going to ever so slightly pick on you for this post, though in fact there are a number of other posts recently that seem to imply that only negative reactions are acceptable. I am afraid that I find that a bit unreasonable.

At the time of writing the post count in this thread by FTer is:
So I am in the "prolific" category, I guess, but at least I have actually experienced BoB, which is something of a minority interest in this thread. I think under 10% of posts are first hand experiences. Which isn't a problem, but I think it is worth highlighting those experiences which are second or third hand.

Today I had my tenth experience of BoB, in summary:
1 - bad experience - detailed upthread in lavish detail.
1 - subpar - detailed above
1 - tea a bit too cool (probably the same percentage as the previous system)
7 - OK to good experiences, biased towards the most recent flights. One I've reported on in detail, and others in summary form.

Now I'm not wild about having to pay for drinks/snacks, but equally I don't think it's the end of civilisation as we know it. It is quite possible to find oneself within shades of grey here.

Having been through 10 experiences, how would I improve this process?

1) Put some 80 ml cuplets of free water on the trolley and BA shouldn't lose sleep over any lost sales. (Incidentally I have seen plenty of free water handed out, I've not witnessed any pushback on that first hand).
2) Put some meal deals on the menu, competitively priced, and put them on screen 1 of TourPOS. At the moment there are just 2 options, "Food" and "Drink", they could put half a dozen meal deals leading straight to payment and save a lot of key pressing.
3) Make the TourPOS and bluetooth printer a lot more robust and simplify the menu process. Have a 3rd backup device on board.
4) Allow pre-purchase via MMB and/or allow Highlife Shop vouchers to be bought offline, for those who don't have credit cards or Avios.
5) Get contactless working ASAP! [This is coming apparently].
6) Get the barcode visible offline on the BA App (and workable under TourPOS).
7) One or two hot items which aren't sandwiches (Cornish Pasty? Vegetarian Pasty).
8) Allow Newcastle travellers bacon baps! They are actually quite tasty in my view.
9) Sort out the naming conventions for the food items. The Swiss Mountain chocolate bar has those two words prominently on the product, but they don't appear on the drop down menu on TourPOS.
10) Add a scan food option on TourPOS so the staff don't have to keep searching for items. And/or order the items on the screen by Tray ID.
11) On A319s, with 3 crew, arrange the second trolley so that it stays in the galley but has the rarely used items available for quick retrieval, by changing and labelling the internal trays.

And, probably above all,

12) Please BA, allow the SCCM some leeway on customer service remediation. In particular if a flight is delayed more than 30 minutes crack open the Highland Spring. Due to the commission on sales, I can see crew going mad to throw away the margin, but a bit of give/take may be a good investment.

secretplantofightinflation

Thank you so much for your insight.

I defy anybody to take in this post and say that BoB is a real positive improvement to the entire customer experience at BA.

orbitmic

I have now had two experiences of BoB, and my partner has had two as well (separate flights). I avoided posting from the first experience as I wanted to see if things got confirmed or not, but I feel that now, with two direct experiences plus validation from someone whose observation skills have always humbled me based on two more flights, I feel that I can make my first experience-based comments.

First, to clarify, I am against the principle of BoB at least the way that it has been conceived by BA (ie everything is for sale, nothing is free). If you feel that you should discount my perceptions on that basis, that is fine by me, I'd rather be transparent about the fact that I am not neutral to the concept. That said, by trade, I am used to having to dispassionately observe and analyse things on which I may have opinions. In many ways, it is my bread and butter and I've committed a lot of time and energy trying to do that as well as I can even when I do not like the result. Still, I always prefer to announce any personal preference so that people can decide what they want to make of it.

Second, because I am against the principle of BoB, I have decided not to buy anything so please, do not expect any comment on the substance of the products offered. I know much of the M&S range anyway as do many members, and many of the drinks, so I'm not so sure there is much mystery about product quality anyway.

Third, both my flights were band 3 on A319s. One was absolutely packed on one of my usual routes, the other one was more than half empty in Y on a route I am less used to. My partner flights were an A320 domestic and an A319 band 2 although I will only refer to them regarding one specific point. With that in mind:

1) The technical side of things actually went quite well on both my flights. There was a fairly large intake on the packed flight (I'd say about 15 orders across 20 rows of Y, mostly water, but a few coffees/teas, 2-3 spirits and at least one beer and one wine. Not much to eat: i could only see one sandwich and one fruit salad). There were almost no sales on the half-full flight: from what I could see, only 3 orders for the whole cabin.

Even on the packed flight with lots of sales, service was reasonably fast. Much slower than the free service of course, but it took about 50 minutes out of the 1h40 flight. By contrast, the half empty flight with 3 sales took nearly 30 minutes to complete and I don't really understand why. I think crew had issues with the material.

2) Service organisation seemed a bit random. In both cases, announcement about BoB was made that mentioned that crew would first walk to take orders for hot items but this was not actually done on either occasion.

'Free' tap water was served as people asked for it in one case, after the end of the BoB service in the other.

In both cases, one SCCM took care of CE and only one trolley was used for BoB in Y. In the busy case, two crew members manned it whilst the third person at the back brought the free water when signalled by the trolley colleagues. The second (back of the trolley) and third (back galley bringing tap water) crew members swapped half way whilst the front of trolley crew member took all the payments. In the less busy case, third crew member just stayed idle in the back galley during the BoB service.

3) In the second (less busy) case, the free water was a real issue. An old lady in my row asked for it but she was told she would have to wait till the end of the service as were others. She was foreign, was feeling very hot (the cabin was unusually and unpleasantly hot indeed) and had wheelchair assistance. The crew were so slow that I asked if they would give her a plastic glass and I served her from the bottle of sparkling water that I brought. I do not understand why crew are not given jugs or large bottles to keep on the trolley, and serve as they pass through as it would make a lot more sense.

4) Paradoxically (or maybe not), on the flight where only three sales were made, I found the crew really pushy and this was outright unpleasant. They were really trying to 'sell' the stuff which I personally found intrusive and annoying. The other crew were more neutral.

5) On both flights, there were complaints about access to the toilets because there really were trolleys in the aisles for most of the flight which is really annoying. I personally think that it is frankly over the top to start trying to sell duty free after having done BoB and in between rubbish rounds. I really wish BA wouldn't. I wouldn't mind them stopping duty free altogether but if they insist on keeping it, I really think the process needs to change. Maybe this could be done at the same time as BoB, if not, maybe the 4th crew member could start duty free sales before his/her colleagues start dealing with BoB as duty free goes much faster (few people buy anything at all) and this could be got rid of faster.

6) On both flights, most passengers blatantly ignored the crew. Not say 'no thanks', nor even looked at them and nodded or anything. Just plainly ignored them. I also saw more people not greeting the crew goodbye than I ever have on BA before. I really do think that there is resentment from many passengers against the new system or at any rate that it has really changed the relationship between passengers and crew.

7) The worst way in which it materialised is that in both of my flights, crew authority was effectively questioned. In the first case, whilst taxiing, a passenger was having her phone on (it rang and you could hear message reception beeps). When the crew member were asked her to switch off, the reaction was dismissive and angry. Most strangely, my partner experienced the same thing in one of her two flights. On my second flight, when we started our descent and a crew member asked someone in the row in front of mine to put their seat upright, again, the passenger's reaction was nearly furious for no apparent reason.

Now, I have seen both things happen before, but in 3 out of 4 flights, this is very much a record for me despite very frequent flying. Maybe this is just bad luck, but equally, in my view, it could be a sign of something pretty tragic: I fear that passengers may be respecting cabin crew less when they see them as people trying to sell them 'stuff'. I sincerely hope that this is not the case but this is something that I will keep an eye for next week.

8) On today's flight, we deboarded by bus and the CE passengers next to me in the bus were complaining between themselves about the slowness of the CE service and the fact that the CE crew member was absent for a lengthy period of time whilst they wanted after meal coffee (she did the rubbish runs and I think it was all the harder that people could finally start queuing for the toilets second time round and many did).

9) On one of her flights, my partner got a chance to speak to one of the crew members when precisely waiting for the loo. She asked her what she thought of the new service and she confirmed that she thought it was not pleasant for the crew. She even mentioned that some of her colleagues felt uncomfortable when selling the food and drink, and when pressed to explain more, she said some almost felt 'ashamed'. Apparently, she said she did not feel that way herself but still did not like it and she confirmed that many passengers are not very happy and take it on the crew.

In summary, my sense is that the technical issues are starting to get slowly resolved. Nevertheless, service takes long and I think that at the very least, BA needs to rethink both tap water service and duty free sales which should probably just disappear altogether or failing that be reorganised completely so as not to block aisles for another lengthy amount of time.

However, more importantly, I have the impression that BoB has changed the dynamic of the relationship between crew and passengers quite significantly. It seems that some passengers overtly respect crew members less (including in their safety capacity) as a result and are plainly less pleasant to them and that some crew are conscious and unhappy about that difference even though I'm sure that others might still like the new service. To me, the atmosphere was clearly less friendly and more tensed on both flights, and my partner (who doesn't feel as negatively towards BoB as I do) had the exact same feeling and was quite touched/saddened by what the crew member she talked to told her. I'm sure many members will make fun of me for it, but this change actually makes me rather sad, on behalf of passengers and crew members alike.

rapidex

Excellent analysis.I certainly wont make fun of you,for I feel exactly the same.As a GGL/CCR I always looked forward to my BA European flights,now I am dreading them.I can renew my status on longhaul,so will not bother with BA shorhaul much.Using Eurostar has much greater appeal.