Originally Posted by mccdatabase
....if it is the latter even if action did suceed in raising the rise by maybe a per cent or so the disruption and inconvenience to our customers would cause even more of them to turn to other carriers in which case the tiny profits already made would be wiped out and we would all be back in the same situation next year ! this is not management spin as you call it, IT IS COMMON SENSE, there is a right time to play hardball and there is also a right time to be realistic, too many companies have gone down the pan because a few militants thought they knew better, I do not want to see bmi be another....
Arguably, if the industry stopped treating the customer as God, it'd do itself a favour.
Of course, its always hard to be the sacrificial lamb.
The sooner we all realize that we're all effectively subsidising the general public by affording them the opportunity to travel to ALC for the price of a Chinese take-away, the better off we'll all be.
Over-capacity, lack of pricing power, extreme revenue sensitivity....
Maybe its time for some rationalisation?
Nevertheless, some airlines are making boat-loads of cash - RYR, BA, EZY, EK.....
Which suggests perhaps that the economic climate in the industry isn't as hard as the bmi management would have you believe.
Aren't we somewhere close to the peak of the business cycle? 10 years isn't it? Which means we're five years from the 2001 trough....
You can't whinge about fuel prices, if you're charging a fuel surcharge....
How to resolve the apparent contradiction?
IMHO, you have to question the credentials of the bmi management.
High oil prices are no surprise.
They've known about the end of the ECA subsidy for years.
Why is the CEO claiming the business transformation is only 25% complete? Why did he leave three quarters of the job to be done in 2006/7 - the last year of the subsidy? What has he been doing the last x number of years? Has the evidence that the agreement with LH was not delivering the expected benefits for BD only surfaced this year?
Sure he's got a number of headaches. Most airline management's do.
But whilst he's investing in an infrastructure to support operations out of LHR to RYD, JED, BOM & DME, he's failing to realise that grandiose management aspirations need to be shared by the workforce to come to fruition.
The best asset bmi have is their workforce.
I contend that they are quite right to demand that hand in hand with
the operational investment going on in the business as of now, a little more investment is made on their account.
As I understand, the bench-marking undertaken by the bmi CC demonstrates the inequalities.
I hazard a guess, the performance of the business would improve as a result.