williamn78

Rewind about 6 years and I had been on one long-haul flight in my life, as a teen to the USA with family. Now in my 30’s I actually had a mild fear of flying and would take a maximum of one return flight within Europe a year.

Finding myself 6 years ago with friends temporarily living in Beijing, Sydney and New Zealand I decided to fight my fear of long haul travel and did a trip to visit all of them. I guess at this point I became aware of the Executive Club and signed up, even though only one of my 6 flights was on BA.

That BA flight was unremarkable, and my main in-flight memory was how great Qantas’ Premium Economy was on the way back from Oz.

Fast forward a few more years and I found myself unexpectedly spending 10 months living in Washington DC. I guess I did a 3 trips back and forth and at this point started reading this forum. With the aid of a few AA F trips I found myself with Silver status which I loved.

I kept that up and a few years later after that accepted a job in Toronto. After a year of back and forth I found myself achieving Gold. It feels most odd to be suddenly a frequent flyer, having just six years ago been slightly scared of flying (there is still some residual nervousness) and totally unaware of this forum and the Executive Club.

I was pretty excited to become Gold but now a year later I am about to fall back to silver. I have to admit that Gold has been a slightly underwhelming experience, and really not all that different from Silver given the huge TP differential.

In that year I’ve completed 19 flights on BA and I’ve only had one really great experience as a Gold. I was flying economy and as I was getting on the CSD told me he’d notified the crew I was in ‘that’ cabin (!) and that I would be well looked after. I was sceptical but indeed I was - two glasses of champagne came down to me and I was served a meal from CW. Total cost to BA of that treatment was presumably close to zero, but I felt really special.

Sadly that was about it as far as special treatment I received during my year went. Shortly after this the YYZ route changed to mixed fleet and since then I rarely get acknowledged or welcomed let alone receiving anything extra.

For me the biggest benefits of Gold have been the advance seat selection, and the First Wing. Unfortunately I have several experiences of late where my seats have got moved at the last minute which is pretty frustrating. In one instance there was definitely no equipment change yet the twin seats I’d booked right at the back of the Y cabin got switched. The second time there was a change of equipment, but surely it’d be possible to book me into an equivalent seat? I went from exit row to an aisle way back. Its hard not to suspect that BA would rather sell the seats rather than give them to a Gold member.

Doing the same flights on a fairly frequent basis gets you uesd to all the routines of service and I have found myself surprised how often the crew seems to have less sense of this than I do (particularly after the switch to mixed fleet). In recent flights I’ve noted :

- WTP pre-flight drinks being missed
- Meal trays being cleared before tea and coffee served, wit the comical situation of the crew wandering up and down with teapots but with none of the pax having any receptacles for it
- Dinner service form LHR not commencing until 2 hours after take off
- Bars closing over 2 hours before landing
- No glasses or metal cutlery in WTP (the cutlery not the crews fault)
- Me having to donate my blanket to a fellow pax after she never got the one she asked for.
- Being missed from the drinks service
- Same flight being missed from the second drinks service (!)
- Cabin lights not being dimmed (after asking the CSM, she said they didn’t dim them as it was a daytime flight, which is odd because every other time I’ve taken it they have!)
-Most recently no breakfast (ok, the tiny muffin that it is in Y) being served. Upon enquiry I was told it was because the flight is scheduled to land so early. Again, untrue as I take the flight all the time. Upon enquiry to the CSM, he said it wasn’t loaded and we’d have had to wait 2 hours on the ground for it. Fair enough, but why not tell people rather than serve drinks and hope people don’t notice there’s no food, and then lying to a pax who enquires?

All of these are tiny tiny things…but cumulatively they do tarnish ones perception of a company. I deliberately let my Gold status lapse this year for three main reasons. First because while nice (I wouldn’t turn down one of those two year extensions…) I didn’t really feel it gave any hugely significant advantages over silver, at least not ones commensurate with the expenditure needed to attain it. And second, a feeling that BA takes is customers for granted and doesn’t do the many little things that would cost almost nothing to make regulars feel loved, plus the small service failings such as the above. Third, BA seem to have started to roster unrefurbished 747’s and 777’s onto the YYZ route now - if this continues it could seriously make me consider switching to Air Canada, it is such a huge reduction in quality.

Oh and lastly, my upgrades have totally dried up since becoming Gold! I was averaging about a 50% hit rate during my first year of flying to and from YYZ but since being gold - zilch!

Anyhow, I have no idea if this has been remotely interesting reading, but having been excited to get Gold I thought I’d share my experiences.

LondonCanuck

Very interesting observations. From someone who does that route 8-10 times a year, I wonder how MF will change the experience for me. From friends that I know who are "regulars" on that route it doesn't sound promising, having said that, I have had some excellent flights in Club and First with occasional WTP flight with MF crew, so will wait to pass judgement.

WRT Gold vs Silver, I agree with you. The Club side in YYZ is better than the First side (and faster internet), so if that route is your main one, no difference. As long as you don't have to fly Air Canada :-)

corporate-wage-slave

Thanks for taking the time to share your observations.

A couple of thoughts from me here:
- You really should have had more than one Gold greeting in your flying time. Now YYZ is tricky, particularly in the YYZ-LHR direction, since it's a fairly short flight, a need to maximise sleep time, a big workload in the first hour, and often a lot of status passengers on that sector. YUL may have been a better route for this. MF CSMs are generally slightly better at looking after the regulars than legacy, in my personal experience, but I agree it isn't consistently done. Given that YYZ is a cash cow for BA they do need to look after the GCH in all cabins, and I'm sure there will be BA staffers who would be concerned to read about your experiences.

- MF howlers are certainly there. Typically the crew may have only ever done a dozen longhaul flights in their life, so you're way ahead of them on the experience stakes. They make up for it in other ways, they're often genuinely enthusiastic for their job, and looking forward to looking after their customers. It's kind of a package I feel. Most passengers cannot tell the difference (outside the strike period since low staffed aircraft is going to be picked up, as we have seen) - it is more of a BA FT thing.

But the upside, I guess, is that directly or indirectly BAEC has contributed to you having the freedom to fly where and when you want, and that's not a trivial point.

Pascoe

CWS - what's your theory on this? Simply that as they're coming to the job on very different Ts and Cs it's more likely they're there for the love of it? Or something else?

corporate-wage-slave

Oh, simply that they had their training much more recently, and one focus on this is clearing down iPad messages and greeting gold cardholders. Furthermore, given the heavy MF turnover, a lot of CSMs find themselves reliving the training every few months. Legacy CSDs know it all by heart and perhaps take a slightly different approach. In some cases they read their customers a bit differently: If a GCH is engrossed in a movie they are probably unlikely to disturb them, whereas a CSM just might.

There was also a big difference on the 747s, before the SuperJ came on stream, when CSDs would frankly not have the time to do greetings since they would be working the left aisle in CW flat out, whereas the CSMs on the same aircraft would have a backup staff member and in theory at least, more time to do service items. This was thankfully mitigated with the roll out of SuperJs, where to BA's credit, they adjusted the crewing to something far more sensible and left the CSD with the time to do their job better. Now it's still a tall order on a status-rich short overnight flight, and occasionally a flight may be down a crew member (e.g. sickness). 777s and 787s aren't so badly affected, and the A380 is well staffed, but the 747 52J staffing was (and is) a mistake in my view.

Pascoe

I just love the level of detail and amount of experience on this site. Thanks for taking the time to write that...

subject2load

@williamn78 - thanks for sharing a potted summary of your experiences based on a total of 19 l/h flights with BA over the course of 12 months ; a year in which your adjective 'Golden' is, clearly, much more a reference to your BAEC status than the quality of service you received whilst onboard their aircraft. It all makes for an interesting - but, ultimately, a rather depressing - read.

I think your post encapsulates so much about the way in which BA's customer proposition is viewed by a significant number of travellers these days. There can be a great deal of inconsistency and general 'cheap-ness' in the quality of service delivered : the bar being closed two hours ahead of landing / the shortage of blankets / the inadequate food .... being amongst a host of examples reported here by yourself and countless other FT members.

More specifically, your reference to cabin crew lying to you (wrt breakfast) is far from an isolated occurrence (I myself have experienced such a scenario with BA staff, albeit in a very different context). There is, I feel, something inherently worrying about the fact that some BA staff find it either necessary and/or acceptable to lie. However, other than a root & branch change of culture within the whole organisation, I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. I myself certainly subscribe to the theory that the tone in all large organisations is set from the very top ; and I don't see much prospect of things changing on that front any time soon.

Perhaps the one sentence that stood out for me, in your detailed analysis was this :

"All of these are tiny tiny things…but cumulatively they do tarnish ones perception of a company."

williamn78

Thanks for reading and for your thoughts everyone! Of course, I would quite like to bring this to BA's attention but I doubt anyone there is really interested.

Flexible preferences

Well speaking for myself I am interested and I'm very glad you've shared your experience on FT. Your post was balanced and very fair and highlighted some differences with legacy and MF crew - some of which I have experienced myself (waiting over 20 minutes for a pdb in F). I do hope that as, over time, MF crew slowly dominate the cabin crew on BA that the training, support and experience improves so that some of the best aspects of BA crew such as judgment, discretion, efficiency and timing can be restored.