Any way you want to look at the situation, Staff Travel is in a whole lot better shape than it was exactly one calendar year ago. Personally, I give credit to André Dosé and Lee Shave, and it is a shame that they left otherwise I would have expected continual evidence of improvement.
From my own experience and with the exception of one or two sour grapes, I am well treated by the staff however I try to remember to bring my manners and courtesy with me also. It goes both ways, and I accept that some may say "yes, but you are a pilot; take a look and see what kind of treatment cabin crew receive . . . " Point well taken. Unfortunately, this is a fact of life throughout Gulf Air and Bahrain in general.
The major problem I see these days with Staff Travel are related to the Staff Travel on-line system. The system has "it's days" too, sometimes it slows down to painfully unusable speeds or is temperamental. Other times it does not accurately reflect the policies that are in place. I have run across no less than 3 situations where I have tried to book with airlines that we have reciprocal privledges with, but the programming was not up to date and so it did not let me. Things become awkward, and there is no sure way other than to complain to Ebrahim to get these issues resolved, and even then I get the feeling that they sometimes do not get resolved. This is a problem; there is no established recourse procedure and no external oversight or an ombudsman to ensure that problems are resolved and grievances are addressed (therefore improving service and creating less problems in the future). There are other problems with the system, such as incomplete records, and other annoyances that inconvenience the customer and create greater workload for Staff Travel.
The other problem, Sal-E is that the service of sending tickets to the mailboxes is very inconsistent. During the past few weeks I have been told that due to staff shortages, they have discontinued the service, but now and then they do manage to send a ticket through. Sometimes this is unacceptably long-- I recently received a ticket for a trip that I completed weeks ago. Restarting this service, with a reasonable established turn-around period (say, 3 days) could eliminate many trips to Staff Travel (this service could be even out-sourced to a few guys in a shack with a hook-up to Sabre in India).