Good BA advice
Take heed, even the hacks in the city know the real problem!
TOO MANY MANAGERS HAVING MEETINGS WITH THEMSELVES. .Anthony Hilton, Evening Standard
BRITISH Airways is probably doing a bit better than today's figures would have us believe. Air travel has picked up on the transatlantic routes, to judge from the recent results of KLM and some American carriers, and BA should have benefited from that.
But it does no harm for employees and the City to think it is up to its neck in problems. It will make both rather more inclined to accept the pain to come when the result of the detailed 'future size and shape' study is revealed.
The core competence of the airline is clearly in long haul - that is what it has done best since the days of BOAC and what its fleet is designed for. But an intriguing development is that some of the existing European routes out of Gatwick are to be converted to no-frills low-cost operations. It will be a difficult trick to pull off - either a carrier is structured from top to bottom to be low cost or it isn't. Trying to be half-and-half risks doing neither well.
On an admittedly-superficial level, the best thing chief executive Rod Eddington could do to institute a culture of change would be to close and sell Waterside, BA's gleaming headquarters near Heathrow. Opened just a few years ago by Bob Ayling, then chief executive, it has come to symbolise a lot of what has gone wrong - too many unaccountable managers having meetings with themselves to the detriment of focus on the customer. Closing it would not solve BA's problems but it would send a powerful signal.