Behind the need for compensation legislation is the dirty secret of today's airline business - the reverse lottery of "disruption cost transfer" that produces thousands of tiny winners but a few big losers.

Air travel is vulnerable to much disruption entirely outside any airline's immediate control - weather, air traffic, airport problems, technical failures and politics. Statistics predict that all these WILL occur, but not in detail. On average, a particular airport might have thick fog 10 days a year - but no-one can say which dates, let alone between what hours.

In the "good old days" which some us will remember, our airlines took responsibility for their passengers from reservation to eventual arrival - routinely dealing with such disruption. They had reserve aircraft and crews, and paid for the development of fog landing facilities, just for those few days. But that meant "low efficiency", and these "unproductive" resources on standby meant higher fares for all passengers.

Now passengers are driven primarily by lower fares. Airlines know disruption WILL occur, but have cut costs and fares by dumping the practical problems and cost of dealing with it on the passengers directly affected. "Disruption cost transfer" means airlines can fly to airports which charge less - because they didn't install bad weather facilities. When it's foggy, the airline might cancel flights and refund the fare while leaving stranded passengers to solve the resulting problems for themselves. Services essential to the passenger like delivering baggage after an aircraft lands can be subcontracted to the lowest bidder, with the airline denying responsibility for the misery when things go wrong.

Hence the inverted lottery. The vast majority of passengers are relatively happy, because most of the time things go smoothly and they paid less. But those lower fares mean that when disruption DOES occur a small number of lottery losers will pick up the cost, with an expensive nightmare trip. Be careful what you wish for.....

There is a common theme of 'passengers going for lowest fare get what they deserve'.
So just assuming I am willing to pay 10-20% more for better service where do I spend the money?

Same problem exists in retail, it is hard to spend more for actual quality (as opposed to branding/advertising) in many areas.
One example is cheap wood screws from China that are easily twisted appart, even #10. Same 'stuff' (polite form of the word) everywhere I looked.

Perhaps an -airline- backed trip warranty for a premium might actually work.

That's not really so.

If everyone went for the lowest fare there would be no premium class passengers. That clearly does not happen.

Spare aircraft in the old days is a bit of a myth as well, especially at outstations away from base. Goodness, carriers like Dan-Air (relevant to BA because they eventually bought them out) used to operate from up to a dozen different UK departure airports with just one or two aircraft at most - and no spares, running secondhand aircraft 24 hours a day in season.

The need for spare aircraft in 'good old day' was probably due to dispatch reliability.

These numbers are much better than before, the spare is much less likely to be needed so makes less sense to keep one available.

Skytrax Awards
 

Says it all... BA nowhere to be seen:

Qatar Airways named world's best airline for 2017 in annual Skytrax World Airline Awards

:rolleyes:

Leaving aside the fact that nobody in the industry takes the Skytrax awards seriously, what relevance do they have to BA's IT issues ?

Indeed - for over 25 years when flying at my expense (rather than a company-purchased business trip, all too rare unfortunately as I love to travel) I chose to pay more and fly with British Airways as the service did appear to be better than low-cost carriers and many of the other "proper" airlines.

However now that BA seems keen on cutting costs and level of service (eg no food included on domestic and short-haul flights, pay to choose your seat and even then, no guarantee that you will actually get the seat you paid for) what is there left to distinguish it from many other carriers? What incentive is there to fly BA over any other airline any more?

And BTW, FWIW I got my refund paid direct into my bank account 3 weeks and 1 day after claiming for the downgrade resulting from the cancelled flight from the May fiasco; no compensation for the delay, meal I bought whilst waiting etc but then I don't think I was entitled as it was only another couple of hours, and I didn't claim for other extra expenses incurred. Bearing in mind how others suffered much more than I did, I'm prepared to accept what I got.

It was still a bit galling to look at the arrivals/departures boards in PHL and see that "my" flight was the only one cancelled or not running on time though

It's not just that. I'm currently looking into booking flights for a group of people, work related travel. To get to the destination the options are Ryanair, Easyjet, BA and Cityjet (to another airport, actually closer to the destination). BA is likely to have a cabin crew strike during the dates the group needs to travel, and Cityjet only have 2 flights/week to that destination. So you end up looking at this from the "what's the least worst option" angle rather than "which airline do I enjoy flying with". What's going to piss off your co-workers the least, because there's no way they will not be pissed off.

Cityjet, U2 then FR in that order. I doubt if anyone would hate you for not considering bloody awful even without the strike. Unless they have status with them.

Your employer is paying for the flights? It's job related? By the airlines mentioned it must be shorthaul so what's for your colleagues to get pissed-of about except an overactive sense of entitlement? 'Budget' airlines' reliability is at least as good as BA

More problems?

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/br...074725357.html

Now we'll never know the real truth.

British Airways buries report into last IT fiasco | Daily Mail Online

It'll be leaked within 5 days of completion..................

I see it says that people already checked in were unable to print their own boarding cards at the airport, including London City.

I have never managed to get a BA boarding card printed by the machines at LCY (in contrast, the same shared machines work fine for Cityjet). It doesn't even recognise me from my BA card. I always get the bland "we cannot continue, go to the desk". Where, although they can then manage the job fine without problem, I have had to queue for 10 minutes or more to do so.

I see they are still peddling the line "an engineer mistakenly switched it off", which is presumably therefore all that the whitewash report will say. Nothing about the fact that such is a single point of failure, no regard to all the backup, redundancy, duplicated systems, automated recovery etc that supposedly millions had been invested in.

Here is my post earlier in the thread #323 on 30th May. No surprise that the promise to be open has now closed ... :hmm:

Here's the promise by Cruz to tell you what happened:
Quote:
“We will have completed an exhaustive investigation on exactly the reasons of why this happened,” Mr Cruz said. “We will, of course, share those conclusions once we have actually finished them."
BA flights grounded: Apologetic CEO Alex Cruz denies catastrophic computer failure was caused by job cuts | The Independent

So download that article and other reports of the same statement. because, then, if he does not - we'll really know the truth.

Unfortunately, he can't say, 'The IT systems were like that when I took the job and I was told everything was fine.' Not least because that pushes it all onto Walsh & Co sitting round that big fat trough.

The Board can't fire him - because then he might tell the truth! Happily, this is so huge that BA cannot get away without very serious, long term damage and that will drive them up or out.