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British Airways Centenary Becomes PR Nightmare


An Airbus A319 painted in the retro colors of British European Airways, a precursor to British Airways, passes by one of the UK flag carrier’s newest jets as it comes in to land.

British Airways

British Airways poured money into marketing this year by re-painting four of its planes in heritage liveries and running a series of TV and online advertisements hailing 100 years of flight by the flag carrier.

The campaign – which drafted in celebrities like Olivia Colman – sought to rekindle BA’s historic reputation as “the world’s favorite airline”.

Yet the company seems oblivious of the thing that made it so popular in the past: looking after customers.

Striking pilots are not due to walk off their jobs for another fortnight and BA is already in the doghouse over its chaotic handling of the situation. As well as forcing affected customers to wait for hours on its chronically under-staffed call centers, the airline has spread the misery by wrongly telling other passengers that they need to re-book.

Taken in isolation, the blunder would readily be forgiven. But this is just the latest in a string of mishaps overseen by a management team – led by Willie Walsh and Alex Cruz – that seems to have total disregard for its customers.

Walsh set BA on its new path in 2009 – in the aftermath of the global financial crisis – when airlines around the world were in a tailspin. Then the company’s CEO, he claimed BA was in a “fight for survival” that demanded swingeing cuts to staff conditions and on-board service.

In the decade that followed Walsh – who now heads BA’s parent, IAG – has systemically dismantled every aspect of the airline’s premium service: cutting legroom; removing free meals from short-haul flights; charging for checked luggage; doing away with niceties like newspapers on the airbridge; and clamping down on all but the most legally irrefutable compensation claims.

His masterstroke was appointing Cruz – the former boss of Spain’s Vueling, a notoriously ruthless budget airline – to succeed him at BA.

While some of the duo’s reforms are reflective of industry trends, the extent to which they have been rolled out surely now discredits BA’s claim of being a full-service airline.

The uncompromising approach has also led to damaging under-investment – and not just at its call centers. Four IT outages in three years have unleashed widespread travel chaos, while a cyber attack last year saw the personal data of some 500,000 customers stolen by hackers. Experts said all the incidents could have been avoided with proper safeguards.

None of this is necessary. IAG is rolling in cash. It made pre-tax profits of €3.2 billion last year, buoyed by its unassailable lead at London’s Heathrow Airport, the world’s second busiest international hub.

Yet BA’s dominance at Heathrow has little to do with commercial achievement.

It has much more to do with the traffic rights grandfathered to the flag carrier by its precursors, British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways. With no alternative hub airports in the UK, Heathrow is the only convenient choice for millions of passengers. And with no space for additional landing slots, BA is the only convenient choice at Heathrow.

It is this stranglehold that allows Walsh and Cruz to treat their customers so harshly year after year. No matter how much passengers complain on social media, no matter how many scathing articles are published in the press  the traveling public has nowhere else to turn.

How ironic that the cause of BA’s rotten situation is the very thing being worn as a feather in its cap: historic privilege.



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