T8191

That cauliflower floret must be the cheapert bottom end of aspirational dining … along with the Cheese bowl with 2 bits of low-end supermarket cheese. They have already scraped the bottom of the catering barrel, but do they have the will/budget to move onward and upward? I have little optimism for 2022 … perhaps next year?

skipness1E

I assume IAG have a contractual relationship with GBS.com ? If so, anyone at BA is bound hand and foot and likely a passive observor to whatever Spanish daddy decides to do.

AirbusA350

Yea S22 season is a write-off, if anything were to change, it should start trickling through from W22 with the real impacts probably only becoming widely visible by S23.

Of course this hinges on the continued endemicity approach of various governments towards COVID and not rolling back things into the dark ages again at the slightest uptick or suspicions around any given variant. It goes without saying this also has to go hand-in-hand with BA/IAG actually willing to take that chance, and risk, and open their wallets.

There are a lot of jobs going at the moment both internally and externally and a heavy proportion of them do seem to be within transformation and change related areas. Being an eternal optimist in life in general, I’ll give BA the benefit of the doubt for now, however, they have to use S22 wisely to really rebuild, otherwise, this time round I think they’ll have people sincerely avoiding BA (and not just like the “boy who cried wolf”, a lot of which we see here funnily enough!)

PETER01

Thankfully for us on here they've kept on corporate-wage-slave as the CFIO (Worldwide)
(Chief Flyertalk Information Officer)

nomadabroad

Have you flown BA recently??! Clearly not. Come back to this thread after you fly BA's 14h+ flights to SIN / SCL in Economy class.....then we can talk!

No hot second meal + cold half sandwiches with KitKat in brown paper bags worse than a Tesco meal deal after 12h of flying as your second 'meal'. This is an entirely new low in BA's catering and whoever's in charge should be ashamed with the current offering in WT/WTP.

Current CW meals not much different than Economy - fruit, dessert and cheese same portion /quality as you would typically find in Economy class, just 'masked' with a nicer container to hide the ugly truth.
'Enhanced' CE meal - appetiser/dessert looks awfully similar to what Do&Co serves on some other carrier's Economy class (i.e. QR)
WTP & WT - no hot second meal across all flights, even to SIN / SCL - replaced with brown paper bag with disgusting sandwiches a-la a high school canteen - this in my opinion is the biggest problem, no sane traveler would stick with BA when you get off the plane borderline starving after 14h in the air because BA is too damn cheap to offer a decent 2nd meal, absolutely disgusting.

A quick reminder of BA's famous HALF portioned sandwich meal deal in WT/WTP, where the other half is saved for the return flight
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/34138138-post267.html
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/34012376-post241.html

subject2load

In much the same way that - for anyone who never has occasion to patronise a particular restaurant (let alone spend thousands on premium cabin air travel) - the food served there will, self-evidently, never be deemed a priority or of personal interest.

Oxon Flyer

The FT advisory panel of armchair pundits, pot-stirrers and tyre-kickers hasn't changed much either.

PETER01

JAXBA

Not GBS.com but IAGGBS.com - an actual part of IAG formed from the various airline departments that used to do the work before it was centralised for 'synergy' (i.e. cost cutting) - https://www.iaggbs.com/

What was left of BA's IT department is now mostly IAG Tech (a silo of IAG GBS) - they work for IAG now, even if doing the same work for BA they were before - BA doesn't own the processes, or the staff contracts, or...

mmxbreaks

It's taken 18 months to get this far. So another 18 to see where it all lands...
​​

skipness1E

"With a diverse workforce spread across four countries, IAG GBS provides creative and innovative solutions to drive sustainable transformation by delivering finance, procurement and airline services, as well as group-wide systems across IAG. Each operating company benefits from the GBS centralised model, driving efficiencies, automation and economies of scale."
A very bad case of the LinkedIn Buzzword Bingo Syndrome......

Jagboi

Seems like a fancy way of saying not accountable to anyone.

ratechaser

"collaboration" is the new accountability. Same at my place, totally federated organisation, we're just supposed to work together to drive outcomes. Possibly with guitars and tambourines.

Kumbaya.

flatlander

More than one airline and airport is saying that the time taken to process Government background checks in the UK is a serious problem, taking "several months" (4-6 months seems to be common). Can any new BA management sort out the Home Office?

Tangentially, I am curious what the typical processing time for an airside pass was in the before times (2018, say) ?

13901

Thanks for the confirmation and indeed not a good job description for mr John. He's a human lightning rod with big expectations on one side and zero budget/manpower on the other. GBS is seen as a cost centre in IAG, unfortunately, not as a "value aggregator". Sometimes I wonder what would've happened had BA gone down the Lufthansa System route; at one point in the mid-noughties it almost felt as if it would...

Well, the mess at LHR has Alex, Willie and Tom Stevens' names on it. Back in '19 when the HCS above-and-below the wing was being done a lot of managers (and people from the shop floor) kept on saying to them that their newly-devised organisation was way too lean. Cutting down team leaders and shift managers in Baggage and Logistics was 'fine' until you had disruption, and it ignored the fact that, whenever there was some, it was the usual suspects who'd rally around and save the day. I remember being in a very heated conversation when some ops managers gave Tom a piece of their minds about what would happen with baggage in the event of a snow day (no one had thought of Covid) and he just shrugged it off. They were even thinking of going full Qantas and remove all personnel from domestic departures, though BA didn't have the background infrastructure (IT primarily) to do that...

Now it's good that none of those 3 are in. Luis Gallego is a smart man and so is Sean. Hopefully he'll pick a good COO with a reputable background. Alex often failed spectacularly in hiring his tier 1 team...

The Home Office is in a bad state I think. We have a new hire from Europe at the moment in my company; he needs a visa, obviously, which we have sourced with no small amount of swearing. But it seems they've now "misplaced" his passport. As in he got somebody else's passport when they returned it.

Anyway, back in the day the Airside Pass renewal still required a good 3 months E2E. You had to provide a basic criminal record check, translated and validated on for every country you'd lived for longer than 28 (I seem to recall) days, and validated by Disclosure Scotland. This had a validity of 6 weeks so timing was crucial. Once that was done, you needed to take your paperwork to HAL for the issuing of the pass and that was the farcical part. My last A/S pass required 4 attempts to get it right if I remember well. First attept failed because they put my DOB rather than Staff No. on it. Second attempt they gave me access to areas I shouldn't have had access to with a 'simple' Criminal Record Check. Third time, misspelled name. Fourth time lucky. It's worth noting that even though you went there to get your photo taken, if the pass is mis-printed you can't just get it re-done there and then, you need to rebook. Classic "computer says naaaaah".