What's the Problem at BA Now?
 

Much against my better judgement, I booked a BA flight to an EU city 2 years ago, and foolishly accepted a voucher instead of a refund when Covid prevented it.

So, stuck with the voucher, I had to use it to book a flight to the same city next Monday 4th April.. So far, so good.

Or rather, so bad. Going to Manage my Booking I find a message saying;

"Potential service disruption may affect your journey. Please review your options below."

The options are (A) cancel and get a refund. (B) do nothing and just turn up as planned, hoping that it's OK, or (C) rebook on to another flight.

(A) is out of the question; for various reasons we have to go. It's most definitely not a holiday. Other paid-for reservations would be lost, with no refund, ie hotac, transport to the air etc.

(B the information provided is useless; What the hell does "may affect your journey" mean? Will it, or won't it? What's the cause of the "potential" disruption? BA's IT? Massive fleet breakdowns? Strike? Why can't the stupid sods in BA give us the information we need to make a judgement call? What's the risk of not getting a flight if we do just turn up?

(C) Rebook when? Tuesday? Wednesday? When? How do we know? How long will the "potential disruption" last" Who will refund all the money already shelled out irretrievably for transport and hotac? BA? In your dreams.

Does anyone have any insight into why BA is predicting disruption next Monday? Is it severe? unlikely/likely/very likely?

I did call the appropriate number to get the full story and advice from a friendly customer service agent. Ho, ho, ho. Guess what? They're rather busy at the moment, so the final recording on any menu option is "Sorry, we're very busy, Please call again later. bleep, bleep. bleep."

Why does anyone book BA, I wonder. I know, that's what I did. Well, I hope others will benefit from my experience.

Meanwhile, can an insider offer any information as to what the real situation is? Please?

If you have been reading or listening to the news recently you may have noticed stories about disruption and delays due to staff shortages. Particularly, security and handling agents. I would guess that that is the problem.

Yes, many thanks for that, I had read about the staffing problems, as well as massive IT failures. But in order to make a sensible decision about what to do, ie which option to go for, I need to know which, how severe, etc etc. And it might be something else entirely.

The flight is one segment of a complicated trip and if I'm going to unravel it I need to do it now.

And, typically, BA confronts me with a blank wall of indifference to the consequences to their customers' interests of their incompetence.

My guess is that - until the day, the airline do not know either. In my field of work, Covid has laid low too many people and every day there are calls to say that someone cannot come in as they have tested positive or have symptoms.

The NHS has the same problem, a friend of mine who works in a GP surgery said that eight people went down with Covid in one week. No company can plan for that kind of staff outage. My brother and his family had booked for Cirque du Soleil at the Albert Hall. Made a weekend of it with family from Devon and Nottingham. Got to the door - Sorry but too many of the backstage crew and performers tested positive, you'll get your money back. Two grandchildren rather dissapointed.

That is what the UK is currently dealing with. No company, particularly one as large as BA with such a range of staff all needing to be fit and ready to go - can promise much these days. We travelled long haul with them just over a week ago and, apart from a delay whilst waiting for cleaners to complete their work on the A380, all went fine.

We were one of the last out on a Friday night, so I was not surprised at the delay. Flight and Cabin crew all fine as usual.

It's not just the UK that's struggling. US carriers are having a bad time as well.

Son went to Boston with BA last weekend for a convention. He came back on the daylight with a connection to home in Newcastle. Plane was on time. No baggage and connection cancelled. He picked himself up, filled in the lost baggage report online while on Heathrow Express and caught The 2000 from Kings X. Bag turned up 48 hours later. Not ideal but he's done enough travelling (since he was a child) to know that you there are times when a bit of personal initiative works best.

Colleagues of same son went on United via San Francisco to Seattle. Plane late from London, missed connection, one bag missing, next flight only had one seat (for two people) next available seat 24 hours later. They decided who should take the one seat, the other went standby (and got on).

It's going to be like this for a while yet.

BA do seem to be making a bit of a meal of the problems though.

The Easter holidays?

That and Covid probably mean that schedules are very difficult to guarantee.

One would hope that a company such as BA would have very robust processes, very good staff training and back-up in place to maintain as near normal service as possible. Isn't that why we pay a lot more for BA tickets than the LOCOs?

Could the OP get the refund and do their trip via trains instead? Eurostar was running normally a few weeks ago when I had to work in Paris. You have to provide a Covid vaccination certificate and a passenger locator form, but it is fairly straightforward.

I can sympathise with BA, up to a point, over the external influences they cannot control, eg Covid keeping staff at home.

My sympathy reduces mightily about the things that result from bad/incompetent management, eg IT meltdowns.

But any trace of sympathy disappears when they decide to adopt a policy of issuing a vague, unspecified, useless "warning" of "potential disruption", and then responding to phone enquiries about what this might mean for a specific flight with "We're too busy to talk to you, please call later".

Presumably the warning has the purpose of enabling BA to say "Well, we did warn you", if anyone is denied boarding and complains.

I was recruited into BOAC in 1969. That, and the BA that it eventually became, was a company people were proud to join and work for. Until it became the foreign-owned cash cow, strike-ridden, poorly equipped, organisation it now is, with it's staff mostly ashamed to work for it, and a incompetent management led by foreigners who doesn't understand IT, let alone air transport, and communicating with their customers.

PS..... Uplinker, Yes we could get the train, probably; getting a train from Warsaw to the West at the moment isn't easy. But only with huge disruption to other essential parts of the trip. As for the refund, get this, quoted from the "warning" of "potential disruption";

"f you wish to cancel your booking a refund will only apply if your fare rules allow it."

Only BA would think of that; it's indicates 100% tone-deafness, and a quite outrageous attitude to the customers they treat so badly, and the law.

You mean all these foreigners that manage successful airlines in the rest of the world? Or are foreign airlines all managed by wonderful British expats that make these foreign airlines successful?

You are old, but your post makes you sound even older, really ....

No, I mean people with no sense of pride in BA as the British national carrier, a title it still carries, with little justification. To them, it's just a financial exercise; sweat the assets until they've nothing left to give, then reverse out.

BTW, I don't mind sounding old, it's what I am. Advancing age both allows and qualifies me to tell it like it is. So there.

Those foreigners might manage successful airlines elsewhere, pity they can't do it in the UK, isn't it?

Ever thought that it might have something to do with the UK? An airline whose pilots voted for Brexit in large numbers, practically sticking their fingers to their European colleagues in the cabin; flying out of a European hub that does not accept ID cards from its closest neighbours who are often not used to needing a passport, claiming that ID cards are not safe (even though they have the same standards as passports nowadays) ... the list goes on.
The culture of short-term thinking is very British, I know of many European managers who got a culture shock moving to Britain and having to deal with very old IT, even the Excel version was so old that Microsoft would not support it. (To sign up for settled status they had to install Microsoft Explorer, discontinued for years :D )

I too was BOAC then BA and witnessed the introduction of new IT. First thing that would happen would be that the accounting aspect of it was paramount and got a disproportionate chunk if the funding, leaving the front line users with a functionally difficult and illogical mess. And the problems showed up during the pre launch trials but the people involved in those trials were either the geeks who loved the challenge or the yes men who liked the kings new clothes.

Ah yes, I remember it well; by 1973 I was in a BOAC Associated Company, which set up its computer reservation system piggy-backed onto the BA system.

A workstation appeared on my desk. I soon discovered that with my Supervisor log in I had not only the power to look at the reservation status of every sector of any service in the next 3 months, but that I could also type out a message to a friend, enter a 4-digit screen address, and send it to his screen where within milliseconds it would wipe what he was doing and show the message. This annoyed the hell out of recipients, but it pre-dated email by about 20 years and was quicker than Telex.

And yes, it was a "functionally difficult and illogical mess", so not a lot has changed.

Dear God, I'm drifting my own thread. Sorry, it's an age thing.

How many staff have been "let go" during the pandemic with no thought of the consequences when things start to get back to normal? Some changes at the top few levels of IAG might be a good way 'Pour encourager les autres'.

An expression involving chickens coming home to roost springs to mind ...

Yes, I've just had that confirmed by a friend currently in the thick of it (but on leave this week) who estimated that their staff shortages are 80% due to bad management and sacking far too many trained and experienced people in the last few months, and 20% due to the present Covid wave. His views about IAG resolutely driving the airline downhill are unprintable in a family forum like this one.

I am reliably informed that Britains largest holiday airline is in a right old state as the summer season approaches. Not enough pilots, management trying to abandon the scheduling agreement plus the usual problems of inadequately staffed handling agents and security personnel at the airports.

Further to all of the above potential travellers will go apoplectic when they see the short haul fares being charged at the moment. e.g. Man Lhr £405 single economy class.

Sorry, above info is now out of date. The fare is now £429.

It's called "pricing out" and is common in many industries when a supplier just doesn't want somebody's business. Consider the case of the car insurance company giving a 17 year old a quote of £10k to insure an old banger

Price example.

London Kracow 5 April.

Ryanair £41 one way

British Airways £357 one way.

And the Ryanair flight is more likely to operate.

What has British Airways become?

British Airways is getting a name for IT failures and generally being unreliable. They need to fix their reliability fast. That may mean allowing load factor to decline significantly for a couple of weeks so there is plenty of slack in the system which would mean fewer customers complaining and greater ability to recover from any further IT failures in the next 2 weeks. This will buy time for a CIO to throw large quantities of money at fixing the most critical IT vulnerabilities.

Sometimes a business has to turn customers away if they don't think they have the ability to deliver a good quality service

Leaving people stranded before they go see families over Easter because of another IT failure will not be forgiven. High fares for 2 weeks for those who have not already booked will be forgiven.

You must not have had a look at the news. Almost all the major airports in the UK are suffering the same. 5-6 just to get through security. At manchester airport on Friday people were jumping the barriers at x-ray to get to their flights. It is absolute chaos right now. No sign of immediate improvement over the next few weeks either.

So I would say a good airline would allow you to cancel for a full refund (for a problem not of their making) or if feasible to rebook for a later date or like they said show up and take your chances.

Also for a sense of balance, on Friday EasyJet cancelled 100 flights due to staff shortages. At the last minute. Would you not prefer an airline to give you some heads up that things aren’t running smoothly and allow you to decide how urgent your trip is?

But it isn’t “the national carrier”. It is not owned by the government. It has no duty to the country, just passengers and shareholders, and workforce. American Airlines is not the national carrier of the US.

Just like British Gas is not the national utility supplier, or British American Tobacco is not the national Tabasco company of those countries. It is a name.

Your other comment I bolded doesn’t make you sound old. More prepubescent.

Surely you would like to be forewarned of potential issues even if they can’t say for a certainty it will affect you? This is the core issue that winds me up. You are grumpy at them warning you, but if they hadn’t and you turned up and there were significant delays or even a cancellation you would be again grumpy that they didn’t inform you. It’s a no win scenario for them, and most companies right now.

Please remember to discuss the problem and not insult each other. This is a very important topic and we all have our own view based on personal history, experience and expectations.

No further comments about the person posting, just information and opinion about the topic.

And another one goes on the ignore list...

Close, but saved for now as you made me laugh with "national Tabasco company".

Why do people have to make ad hominems, the world wonders...

Maybe because the post is totally wrong? It may be a very important post if it was worded what is wrong with aviation/airports lately. That issue has been in the press repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. Instead the poster chose to erroneously place all the blame on one single carrier, even though the issue is affecting every carrier. Even though admits he has seen the news in regards to the issues. Admits a bias in his initial post.

It’s a definition of trolling for a reaction. Which I suspect I will be on furlough for daring to talk back to a moderator but oh well.

Flyhighfirst I am the one Mod that you can talk back to!

I think you are missing the point. As part of the rules of PPRuNe that you agreed to, it is to discuss the topic and not what you may think of the person who wrote it. If you think another person is wrong, please set out your counter argument. There are other forums in PPRuNe used for outright disagreement but we try to keep the 'Cabin' reasonable.

I think it is clear that there are a number of reasons why the airline world is in the current state and the interaction of those different factors. It is interesting to read views of the origin of these problems and, critically, our members own experience of the system/s - good or bad.

Please bear in mind that: Whilst this particular Forum is my prime responsibility, some of the other Moderators who also have oversight in here are not as easy going as I am. It is rare for me to 'furlough' someone here as I prefer an open comment - but it does happen.

Lastly, if all who read this thread have learnt something - then that is great. For example, I had not yet read of easyJet cancelling 100 flights. I would like people to stay, give experience and humour.

Isnt there even the tiniest mention of our Governments decision to discontinue all Covid precautions resulting ina massive ramp up in infections. Not lethal by and large but with tens of thousands of people suddenly getting Covid symptoms sufficient to keep them of work surely has to bear some of the blame. BA do some stupid things mind you and are not very well run but then the metric for a well run company in UK is increased profits / decrease staff and little to no attention paid to product quality or customer service

Having worked with (not for) a few IT outsourcing companies I can tell you that
some of their aims are:-
1. Grow the contract.
2. Try to keep information away from counterpart managers so they become deskilled and useless.
3. employ very cheap staff, who may be useless if there is a problem.

As an aside I know of several contracts which my organisation placed with decent small companies,
and the small company was soon taken over by a large one with foreseeable results. All legal.
Obviously no names.

Fixed your post. You're welcome :)

having worked in IT for 30 years I can also guarantee the worst possible thing is to throw money at IT and makes lots of fixes. It's an axiom that for every bug you fix you introduce a new one.

Somebody needs to look at all these failures and see what common root causes there may be, in terms of technology, interfaces, built-in redundancy, people skillset, testing and diagnostics etc. I spent a lot of time monitoring databases I was responsible for, and they very rarely crashed as I could spot problems days or hours before they became critical. But BA risks losing it's top tier brand reputation by being cheap with IT, which is a false economy. These days IT is an investment, not an expense. We all have smartphones and expect to interact by and large using the smartphone, with the vendors IT setup,

arf23 - you may well have a point that throwing money at IT is a bad idea - I can certainly understand your opinion
Doing the root cause analysis and trying to rebuild BA's IT systems into something stable and robust will presumably take years - it's going to be a long hard slog, and BA will benefit if the likes of Accenture, EDS and Infosys are kept as far away as possible
But... and there is always a but... what would you do if you were the CEO or CIO of BA, knowing that your IT is a terrible state, it's the start of the 6 months most important to annual revenues, the company has had an awful 24 months of pandemic and that the customers with high commercial loyalty status are getting distinctly nervous about booking with BA ?

It's likely the CIO and immediate team have a lot of knowledge about how the IT infrastructure works - it may well be honourable for them to resign in the long term, but equally honourable for them to stick around for a few months to help fix the mess first
No, sticking lots of plasters on gaping wounds is not the right thing to do long term, but what *should* the CIO of BA do right now to keep the company operational and credible over the spring and summer ?

The IT at BA may well be a mess and is certainly worthy of debate but from what I'm hearing this week's issue is very much Covid bug related, not IT bug related..

Some sectors/trips are apparently being cancelled at pretty much the last possible moment when the folks who look after the crew side of things realise they don't have enough fit bodies.

Air travel disruption across the USA
Easyjet cancellations

As we know, software developers are clever people. Perhaps too clever for their own good really.

They often make things far more complicated that they need to, which is why we find bugs in the system. There are a couple of reasons for making it complicated. They enjoy the challenge and the longer it takes to get it working, the more money they earn.

Whilst it’s simplistic to say simple, it’s often what an IT system needs to be. Far too many are not used to their full potential, because they don’t need to be used that way. They contain solutions to problems that no one identified previously.

However, to put the blame on the software people is unfair. They are responding to what was asked of them, when often the client doesn’t really know what they want. They just know that they need something better than what they already have and they do that by asking the specialists to give it to them. When given a blank piece of paper, everything, included the kitchen sink, is going to be be up for option. Lots of nice to haves and much less essentials. It’s no wonder things go wrong and take ages.

Its not just aviation either, with the MOD and Government departments amongst the worse organisations overspending and late.

Chuck covid into the mix and it’s not surprising that things are bad at BA. They need to take a hard look at themselves if they are going to get out the mess they’re in.

My reading of the email wording in the post would give me a similar reaction to the poster: telling me of a "potential service disruption" is absolutely no use to anyone. I really do not understand why businesses try and hide behind platitudes and generalisations. If something is going wrong then that's fine, it happens, no one can expect 100% reliability 100% of the time without paying for triple redundancy backup, which, as SLF I know I don't. But please tell me what has gone wrong so that I can understand it and plan around it. Saying "due to Covid-19 related staff absences a potential service disruption" lets me plan better as I can better understand the risk. Just saying "potential service disruption" doesn't let me plan, is it Covid? Is it IT? Is it strike action? Is it bad weather? Is it due to the potential grounding of 90% of the fleet? Each of these has different risk profiles. Without knowing which it is I'm in the dark as to whether to take the risk and turn up, take the refund, rebook with a different airline / different time etc.

This is almost thread drift as Covid is the immediate problem but ... A good friend of mine was on a long term contract for BA developing software when it was all outsourced. It is a long and painful story. For myself, I was in Telecommunications and IT for 27 years and saw the start of the outsourcing game / fashion in New York in 1987/88. I did not like it and have never liked it. Call me old fashioned but I quote my father who was in Personnel Management (before it became Human Resources) and then in a specialist agency recruiting 'C' level staff and their close subordinates.

In his retirement when I discribed outsourcing to him he said: "Unless you have control over an employee's salary - you have no control." He also quoted the famous line "You need to be able to reach out and grasp someone warmly by the throat ..." The outsourced employee is not answerable to the client - but to their own manager who has the money.

I agree with those (above) who state that the refurbishing of the software suite at BA is a mammoth task and better to be dealt with by Main Board directors who actually understand IT and not put out to big consultancies. This process will take years but, as far as we know, IAG has not yet started. I DO UNDERSTAND the cost of this and the difficulty of doing so post Covid but - they should have started it five years ago when the weakness of their systems was becoming apparent.

Many senior company people in the UK do not understand that they are an IT Company who happen to: Make Baked Beans / Paint / Cars or operate aircraft for pax and cargo. The IT enables everything. I have seen at first hand, large UK companies fail to understand this.

I am booked on a Virgin Atlantic flight to LHR in a couple of weeks..can anyone advise if they have had any scheduling problems? Much googling hasnt turned up any problems, but if its outside agencies causing the problems, surely they will be affected too?

Also, whas the queue like at border Control in the early morning/ plenty of gates open?

PAXboy, I am an ex-BOAC/BA man and agree with you 100%. I watched the start of so many things being outsourced. In some areas it can definitely be a benefit but in the core areas of business like IT it is a false economy and you quickly lose control of standards.