"Dear colleague
InFlight Customer Experience Business Plan
At the end of January our company announced its first ever profits warning to the City. We said we expect to make a loss of around £150 million for the full financial year, the largest loss in our history. In these tough economic times, we are burning cash at £2.7million every day, spending far more than we are earning.
Like other airlines, we acted swiftly to respond to this crisis. We cut our spending, reduced managers by 33%, froze non-essential recruitment, temporarily parked aircraft and reduced our capacity. And we carried out a root-and-branch review of every area of our business.
Every part of the airline will play its part to ensure our survival as we face our toughest ever trading environment and today I wanted to write to you personally to let you know the steps we’re taking in InFlight Customer Experience (IFCE).
The bottom line is IFCE need to make a saving of £82 million during the next two years (this is equivalent to our current annual employment costs in IFCE being 14% lower than they are today by year 2).
These are extremely challenging numbers, particularly when 99% of costs in IFCE are employment costs. Together we will need to find a permanent and sustainable solution, which meets the targets we have been set and helps us respond to an increasingly competitive market. As I have indicated, the whole business has significant targets to achieve including Flight Ops, Catering, Engineering, Airports etc, so we are not alone and we must make sure we play our part in full.
During the past six weeks we have reviewed a number of proposals to deliver the employment cost savings. Intensive meetings for the next three weeks opened today with the Trade Unions, via the relevant NSP forum.
Everyone in IFCE has the opportunity to keep up to date through the In Touch Programme. A new Daily Live Web Chat on the Crew Discussion Forum has been set up where you can talk directly with me or any of my leadership team. You can also email the team at
[email protected]. Of course, nothing beats face to face communication so please take this opportunity to talk to your manager, or my leadership team at one of our special briefings in the CRC at T5 and Gatwick in the coming week.
Quite rightly you would expect my team to demonstrate strong leadership over these issues and we want everyone in IFCE to understand the core principles we will adopt throughout this period of change:-
Keep our focus on the customer and ensure we stay one step ahead of the competition by continuing to deliver world class customer service every time
Minimise the impact on our current crew and ground teams
Take everyone in IFCE with us on this difficult journey by actively communicating in an open, honest and timely manner.
Look for ways to improve people’s work/lifestyle balance in IFCE alongside any changes we make
Changes must deliver genuine, sustainable and long term productivity improvements in the way we work
Those of you who I’ve met over the last few weeks have said that you recognise the need for change but ask that I do all I can to minimise any personal impact to you financially. To achieve this I believe we need to focus on contracts for future crew whilst looking at how our existing people can be as productive as possible.
This is a very tall order but the circumstances have never been so serious. However, we are confident that there can be a path through but we will need your full support to achieve it. There is a real need to move quickly on what our future cost model should look like and it will have to be radically different from today’s to make these kind of savings permanent.
This is a very challenging period for the whole company and you will know of the external financial crisis that all employers are facing. We also appreciate that this letter contains some tough messages but we will need everyone’s support in IFCE to deliver our contribution if we are going to survive in the short term and be competitive in the long term.
I will communicate directly with you again as soon as I have further news.
Yours sincerely,
Bill Francis
Head of InFlight Customer Experience"