corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk and welcome to the BA Forum Echobunny (any connection with Porcupine?), and indeed even with a bit of a gap it's good to see you here, I hope we will see plenty more of you in this forum where you should feel most welcome.

noubliepas

My frequent GIB flights have become a bit of a farce - BOB is pretty popular on flights from GIB due to the woeful airport offerings, but so far on 6 out of 9 flights, they have sold all the sandwiches on the outbound and there is nothing left for the GIB-LHR pax. Three times (including this week) they haven't reached past row 20.

Surely it's not hard to set aside stock for the return flight? I'm not blaming the crew for this, it comes from poor management.

I actually don't mind the concept of BOB (although I think tea and coffee should be free), but BA seem to be really struggling with the execution. Didn't they spend time travelling on other airlines first to see how it should be done?!

Percy Pig

LGW-TRN, 1 Feb.

Sat in row 12, 5 rows of CE. 80% full-ish?

5 Purchases before me in rows 6-11. Some problems with payment system/printer so it took about 25 mins to get to me. Cabin Crew seemed stressed. They had a single sheet of paper headed "troubleshooting" that they referred to often. By the time they had got to me problem with the payment system had been solved and it only took 1 minute to take my payment on credit card. The payment system seems ridiculous. A card reader attached to an ipad, meaning you have to turn the whole contraption upside down and back to front to pay? How overly complicated.

I was very satisfied with my purchase

Padmeister

Tobias-UK

Cannibal!

Worcester

Chatted to a Crew member last week on a flight and she said that management are being remorselessly positive (ecstatic I believe she said) about the roll out and quoting happy passengers on the company intranet. Crew member was not convinced and like so many quoted on here referred to the issues with the payment system.

Worcester

To be fair he did not say that he ate them. Perhaps he just likes photographing them? Maybe he has little collection of animal shaped confectionery? Perhaps he just wanted something to talk to. Who are we to judge?

Percy Pig

I ate them. Judge away.

layz

I'm posting in this thread because the on-board sales now uses the same system as BoB and the delivery of the service is dependent on BoB being completed.

Yesterday travelling Club Europe on a band 3. No issue with service, CSM did not leave the cabin to assist economy so service was attentive as expected. They did a duty free run and being in CE was the first to be served. I bought a Toblerone (for testing purposes) and asked whether you still got Avios on purchases and handed over my card. First of all he mistakenly thought I'd asked to pay with Avios and said "I'm not sure if you can pay with Avios but I can try". I explained I was actually wanting to earn Avios and so he had to check with a colleague how to do this.

What surprised me was they still wanted to see my passport (and enter details into the machine), the crew in early Jan thought that they'd no longer be asking this for small purchases when they got the new iPad based POS. So they'll take passport details for a £10 shop purchase but you can easily spend more than £20 if you buy champagne, water and a snack and fortunately it's not asked for (imagine how slow it would be if it was).

Amex contactless worked. I decided not to try Apple Pay on this occasion.

Ldnn1

Currently delayed on the tarmac for a couple of hours waiting for fog to clear at INN, and the cabin crew have come through ET pro-actively offering not just water but free orange juice too. Good service in the new BoB era.

Also worth mentioning that the captain has invited everyone over the PA to come and have a play around in the cockpit! Never witnessed that before. There's quite a queue (of mostly men) formed in the aisle now, which the cabin crew aren't too pleased about but captain rules.

corporate-wage-slave

This was a big concern for me, since the water + juice run tends to take the edge off a short to middle length delay, and if that had stopped I could see problems. So I'm pleased to see this happened (and I think the first report I've see of it here too). There again, if the delay is/was over 2 hours from the schedule - the cause matters not - a passenger can in my opinion then have a drink and/or snack and charge it to BA under EC261, so long as it was reasonable for the length of delay. It would have to take the form of paying and then claiming, and I suspect an Avios payment would be best, but I'd be interested in any reports of this. However in your case, since they did a water + juice run, then that stops that line of approach.

orbitmic

Good experience indeed, but I would warn anyone about deriving any expectation from it: one of my flights last week was delayed by well over 1 hour and nothing was offered at all. So two possibilities here, either 2 hours marks a magic number beyond which the airline starts caring, or the good service on your flight was due to the crew's own initiative rather than BA policy and they might even get in trouble for it.

Hopefully one of the staff who so helpfully give us that sort of information here will be able to confirm if there is indeed a policy to serve free drinks beyond a certain delay time.

Bluebrummie2000

Update:
Return flight FUE -LGW (BA2701) 4th Feb. Not quite so fullas outbiund on 28th Jan. Served quickly and effciently in row 10 (CE rows 1-7). Bought snacks before boarding so only bought drinks. ET cabin took approx 2 hours - improvement on last week. Still got queues of folks trying to navigate around the CC and cart to access toilet at rear.

As othere have posted I too am not sure all this is doing the brand image and 'fly to serve' motto any good. I fully expect some sort of relaunch/roll back after 6-9 months and of course a series of new glossy adverts to re-establish the BA brand

Johnnieboy

It's always nice to finally put a face to a name, but what did you buy from the trolley...?

Flexible preferences

Haha I just did a 'pig' laugh