Fog. LCY and BA Cityflyer

[13Alpha]

Every year around this time, it gets foggy. Flights to and from LCY are disrupted, cancelled or sent to Southend.

Since I started flying from LCY regularly, it's been impossible to get any timely information about the resulting disruption to BA Cityflyer/BA Connect/BA Cityexpress flights either from ba.com or from BA's helpline.

The helpline is generally uncontactable when it's foggy because, funnily enough, when it's foggy in London lots of people phone them up looking for information and there aren't enough people/lines to cope. Also, staff there often seem unaware of the existence of BA branded flights at City Airport.

In addition, the mobile number which I give BA with every booking I make on ba.com for the specific purpose of being kept up to date with changes to flights remains unused. Not just for LCY flights but for any disrupted BA flights.

So for information on whether my flight is likely to operate I end up relying on:
- looking out of the window and guessing
- looking at the City Airport website (says no flights currently arriving or departing, but ba.com says everything on schedule... hmm....)
- hoping for the best, turning up at the airport only to find that my flight's been cancelled or I need to sit on a bus to Southend in rush hour traffic for 90 minutes.

Now I understand that from time to time flights will be affected by the weather, and I also appreciate that the operational side of BA Cityflyer do their very best to deal with the disruption.

But why can't an organisation like BA do better at communicating with its customers ?

A text even 3 hours before my flight is due to leave saying it might be late or cancelled is better than nothing. And, from BA's perspective, preventing 100 angry customers turning up at the airport for a cancelled flight must be worth the effort.

So, BA and BA Cityflyer insiders: it's going to be foggy again this autumn, so are things going to be any different for customers this year ?

My apologies for posting this here rather than contacting BA, but previous emails and letters to the company (to the Exec Club, the normal customer contact address, and to named managers) have failed to produce any kind of response. Ever.

13Alpha

[WHBM]

We live within 1 mile of LCY so get to see the weather every day. This year, although I may have missed some, the only bad morning seems to have been last Sunday morning, when LCY was of course closed.

The misinformation is not just confined to BA, but afflicts the LCY arrivals/departures website, their feed to BBC Teletext page 458, and indeed their FIDS screens inside the terminal. LCY are determined to use the arrival and departure information as a plug for their services, and not to give useful operating information. Thus flight detail for 12 hours or more ahead is shown, but little/no useful information on actual operations.

Flights are cleared from the FIDS immediately after arrival, in some cases where pax still have not come out into the terminal, leaving those waiting for them quite misinformed. This leads to the ridiculous situation in the evening where more than half the flights shown are for the following day.

Details of cancelled departures are posted only at the last minute, yet the inbound may have been cancelled several hours before.

At times of complete closure due to fog you can find that half the flights are shown as cancelled and half not, this corresponds fairly closely to which handling agent is used.

No information is ever shown about diverted inbounds. They seem unable to state "Diverted to Southend", I can only attribute this to the policy having been determined by Marketing, who find displaying information about diversions embarrassing.

It is in the airport's interests, of course, to have delayed pax hanging about for hours, eating up the overpriced food, or parking in the car park for flights cancelled long ago.

I am aware that cancellation/delay decisions are constantly being updated. I am also aware that where such is decided it is regularly not passed on to passengers. And that showing no information about a departure when the inbound has been cancelled is plainly ridiculous.

[Expressflight]

Up until a couple of years ago the website Arrivals Board used to show 'Diverted to Southend' or wherever.

I cannot understand why they have changed this to simply 'Diverted'.

[tablelover]

And for info as I understand it LCY is only a CAT1 airfield so subject to more restrictive weather limits than airports such as LHR or LGW!

Doesnt excuse bad customer service tho!