Still charging extra to get seat assignments?
 

Meanwhile, in conversation with a peer Friday, he related the story that his sister had booked a trip US-Scotland-England and return for July and paid for business class seats. Airline will not give her seat assignments on the outbound leg unless she pays an extra $300 per seat. I remarked that it had to be BA. It is. Still trying to make up cost of IT debacle? Have to wonder what they will charge when she tries to get home.

He certainly does not - and has not from the moment the meltdown started. I was reminded of the Five Stages of Grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying.
She stated that not everyone will visit these points in this sequence, some points are visited more than once but, before the story is complete, they will have visited them all. In subsequent years, these steps have been identified with divorce, losing your job and (simply) LOSS.

No, he doesn't get it because he has lived all his life with cost cutting and knows nothing else. Having to throw away all that you know and believe in AND that has made you 'top dog' and very rich - is almost impossible.

Another current example is Teresa May.

Article is spot on. In 1984 when Ma Bell was divested their operating companies, they forgot at least one major item - they had no billing system. In a 15 year scramble to create one, the requirements folks went to work (and I mean really went to work). Those of us who knew what was about to happen warned management, but to deaf ears. The result was a decision that the billing system should also be a front-end (read real-time) system for customer service, marketing, etc. We had a nightly batch window of 8 hours. With all the new requirements, our first run? 147 hours. Years wasted putting functionality in and more years wasted pulling it all back out.

WW obviously doesnt understand what efficiency actually means. Perhaps he means effective , but efficiency is basically the work got out divided by the work put in . Or money gained over money spent.

The problem with focussing on efficiency and not effectiveness is that you can do something very efficiently as he is claiming but overlooking the critical point which is that efficiency doesnt help if you are applying it to the wrong target or task which is exactly what BA have done . They very efficiently put their IT systems at risk and when the inevitable happened they trashed their reputation and revenues.

Whelk stall managers?
 

Efficiency is when you do more with less. As far as the passengers were concerned, BA did less than nothing with something. His shareholders will find out that not only did he do less than nothing with something, it has cost them as well. Next he will have to convince the board that everything has now been sorted out and this will never happen again. But the little I know about large complex IT systems says that there is no such thing as a simple fix. Complex problems require complex solutions. BA's solution is certainly not in place now and will not be any time soon. Therefore if WW & Cruz are saying anything to the contrary, they are lying. Their "efficiency drive" is jeopardising their passenger's travel plans, BA's staff employment and shareholder value.

WW & Cruz are not fit people to run such an organsiation.

Whenever you get that toxic mixture of arrogance coupled with a blame culture, the end result is always the same.
The true facts (especially bad news) never get passed up the chain of command and blame always gets passed down the chain.

Link that to a business where departments heads and the management chain are payed by performance, you get the kings new clothes scenario.

BA boss Willie Walsh defends airline over IT meltdown - and says criticism has been 'unfair'


Well, he would say that wouldn't he. The problem with all the denial is that it will be soon too late to say, "sorry, we screwed up and it was out fault."

WW & Cruz are following Putin's lead in just denying everything and saying "catch me if you can". Crimea, Malaysian shoot down etc.

True.........
Years ago a company I worked closely with introduced a very competitive (ie Dog eat Dog) inter department management performance incentive.

I will never forget, some time later, one manager shaking his head in despair and saying "this place is now full of people who would rather their department made a profit and the company made a loss rather than the other way round".
All that was happening was each department (sales, design, production, installation etc) just played pass the parcel with any problems.

Luckily the top dogs were smart enough to have a re-think!

BA refusing to pay compo to eligible claimants.

BA compensation blunder wrongly DENIES passengers payouts for flight cancellation chaos

These were seemingly all the weekend charters run from Heathrow with spare time on the short haul fleet.

You might (sort of) understand if BA had initially said they did not do compensation for charters, although that is clearly wrong as otherwise passengers on holiday charters would not be covered. But to say it was the old catch-all, "due to operational circumstances outside our control" seems to show that this old chestnut is just trotted out whenever convenient, and when it is nothing of the sort.

One of the "efficiencies" is the long term trend with capacity at Heathrow. Now with restricted slots you might think there would be a trend to increase aircraft size to increase revenue per slot. But steadily BA is doing the reverse, repeatedly ordering aircraft, describing them as new and large, but in fact replacing even larger aircraft. Thus the recent 787-9, which was certainly portrayed as a 767 replacement, is principally replacing the 777 on many routes. And in fact those 777 routes, not that many years ago, quite likely had 747s. Meanwhile the 767 routes in Europe have been steadily replaced by the A321, and what the A321 used to do is replaced by the A320. ...etc ...

This may suit this year's Spanish shareholders and bonus collectors, but it is a real Selling Off The Silver of the airline, just squeezing it down to an ever greater margin but smaller number of passengers. Competitors, of course, find it difficult or impossible to get Heathrow slots.

Isn't this just the sort of area that a government regulator, concerned with national economic policy, should look at ?

Thomas Cook has an IT problem at Manchester today. Thread moved to the SLF forum: Major check-in problems at Manchester, UK, 13-6. Different cause, but same effect: chaos, queues, long delays. IMHO there's a general failure to manage these crises, which will occur, for lots of reasons, not only IT but also strikes, bomb threats or actual terrorism, weather, disabled aircraft on the only runway, etc. etc.

I am still trying to find an answer to this scenario. EU261 is a law under which pax can claim against an airline for a variety of things.
You arrive in good time at an airport, and due to a variety of problems with the airport infrastructure e.g. check-in IT down, x-ray machines down, not enough staff to process pax in time etc. etc. the outcome is you miss your flight. It is not the fault of the airline, nor you and it is not an act of God not out of control of the airport.
What are your rights and how do you claim? I'm assuming that if the airlines can't get away with it then neither can the airport.
There was a case recently, at a couple of major airports, where the check-in desks IT went down and 000's missed their flights: plus at another, not enough staff to operate the x-ray machines with the same result for 00's of pax.

You then get the hysterical passenger who loses it and screams blue murder along the lines of, "I've had it with this :mad: hole and could kill somebody." Do you call out the Swat team and bomb squad and clear the whole terminal?

Don't think you can claim in this scenario, the regulation seems to be only applicable if the flight is cancelled, the flight is delayed or the passenger is denied boarding. Being held up in the airport and missing a flight does not fit any of these.

Being held up at the airport seems too gentle a description if the hold up is the direct fault of the airport's infrastructure due to lack of staff, back up equipment, etc. If the airline mans it own check-in desks and its IT fails and can't check you in and you miss the flight, surely you have a claim against the incompetence of the airline. Why should the same not be true if the airport's x-ray system or whole IT system crashes. I would suspect any respectable airline would accept responsibility and do the noble thing with your claim. An airport might squirm and wriggle more energetically. Is it being suggested that a civil claim in court would be necessary in such a scenario? In that case a few class actions would sharpen their attention.
My question is motivated because it has happened recently, in EU< and I'm wondering what happened: or did the airports just wash their hands and say, "sorry mate you're on your own." Now where have I heard that before.

The issue of being delayed is for the passenger, not the aircraft. Otherwise what's the point - and what point compensating the passenger.

You pay your money to the airline, it is their responsibility to manage all their suppliers along the way, including airport operators, who in turn have been paid by the airline out of your money. You actually have no contract with the airport, it is your airline who has that. If the airport has let the process down it's the airline who can sue them.

Unfortunately, airlines are notorious for attempting to evade paying compensation. Here's a couple of useful pages on this.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/20...elayed-flights
Airlines use 'loophole' to avoid paying millions to travellers in compensation for delays - Mirror Online

'Airlines are notorious'? Using a loophole may sound underhanded, sneaky and nasty - but it means that they are applying the regulation as they interpret it.

The regulatory history of Regulation 261 is a classic case study in what happens when a set of poorly drafted rules are implemeted across multiple jurisdictions have differing systems of consumer laws.

Cash Compensation initially was payable only for denied boarding. Later the regulation was extended to have compensation payable for economic-reason cancellations. Since they couldn't define 'economic-reason' they opted for it applying for almost all cancellations except those outside of the airline's control, the so-called extraordinary circumstances.

The compensation levels were intended to be punitive and dissuasive. The Commission wanted to stop oversales and economic-reason cancellations so they set the compensation amounts at high fixed amounts with no relation to the fare paid (Similar regulations for rail, bus and ferry cancellations provide for compensation at a percentage of the fare paid).

The courts have ignored the regulatory record and have interpreted broadly what is, and what isn't, an extraordinary circumstance as well as decided that not paying compensation for delays is 'unfair'.

So airlines using 'loopholes' to avoid paying punitive and dissuasive compensation amounts is perfectly understandable.

Using click-bait headlines from the tabloids as being factual should be avoided.

This in part, but also to provide a substantial incentive to airlines to provide a proper and quick service recovery for passengers. What was happening was an initial delay (say fog at a remote location) was being used to justify substantial knock-on issues which were far more about scheduling 20 minute turnrounds all day, staff not being retained on overtime to handle a delayed arrival, etc.

The real clincher was a well-known LCC who had an infrequent service from some European city into a Greek island, the inbound was cancelled, and the return passengers, almost all of whom were returning home from holiday and had checked out of their hotels, were offered either their (return sector only) money back, or being booked on the next flights with seats on that carrier, which were a couple of weeks away. Apart from that, they were left on their own.

The real mistake with the regulations was the "exceptional circumstances" section. That should be done away with. Airlines have a good idea of the numbers of such Exceptional Circumstances over time, and should budget to handle these. Then there would be much more pressure applied by, say, the Heathrow carriers to the airport leaving runways uncleared of snow for days.

When airlines sought to evade paying compensation by citing exceptional circumstances such as mechanical problems with their aircraft or crew shortages, then they were taking the piss. I stand by my use of the word "notorious".