It’s time to strip the word British from BA
ROBERT HARDMAN, who like thousands has seen his family holiday ruined, says the airline no longer deserves to call itself our national carrier
YOU might imagine that on the most chaotic day in its history, British Airways would have made a vague effort to go the extra mile. You might have thought it would try to make life just a little bit easier for hundreds of thousands of passengers left wondering what on earth they were supposed to do – and where they were supposed to go.
But no. It’s their Bank Holiday weekend too, you know. Bang on 8pm on Saturday, normal office closing time, they just turned off the phones. They did not turn them back on again until yesterday morning, not that anyone was answering anyway, leaving the exasperated travellers of a thousand cancelled flights – my family among them – to stew.
Throughout Saturday, the biggest crowd in Britain was to be found neither at the English nor Scottish Cup Final but at Heathrow’s Terminal Five. Like tributaries of the Thames, queues to join queues gradually grew into sweaty estuaries of human confusion.
With nowhere to sit, many people stood in line for hours for want of anything else to do. At no point was there any sort of coherent announcement. Instead, there was sporadic, conflicting (and often false) advice from the handful of BA staff bold enough to break cover.
At which point, I was struck by two things. On the one hand, everyone was being astonishingly stoical and polite in the circumstances (last week’s horrors in Manchester had given us all a sense of perspective). Many people were in tears, including one of my children, but there was no fighting.
On the other hand, the time has surely come to remove the B from BA.
This clapped-out, demoralised shadow of its former self must now join British Steel and British Leyland in the pantheon of bygone national giants. Why should Britain have its name sullied by this corporate clown act any longer? Why do we still refer to it as our socalled ‘national carrier’ when its parent company’s registered office is in Spain – and Easyjet carries millions more passengers?
Next time, our Olympians or footballers jet off to represent Britain, they should fly with Flybe – a genuine UK- based airline which operates far more British flights than BA – instead of giving undeserved publicity to this ailing behemoth.
For this weekend’s global meltdown was not some sort of random rogue incident. It was the latest – and the most alarming – symptom of collapse at an outfit that should be on every broker’s ‘Sell’ list when the markets reopen tomorrow morning. Last year, the airline was crippled by a succession of terrible IT collapses in March, June, July and September, though none on the scale of this weekend’s total meltdown.
It is constantly under the threat of strikes from a workforce of which many are clinging to cushier conditions than their counterparts on the budget airlines (with fresh action planned for the summer). Yet, at the same time BA, has decided to go down the budget route by scrapping all free snacks and charging £2.30 for a cup of tea.
Certainly, I can’t imagine that anyone flying with BA this weekend will feel remotely inclined to book with it again. The subsequent video message from its underwhelming chief executive Alex Cruz in a hi-vis bib (safely shielded from any passengers of course) and bleating about ‘a power supply issue’ merely amplified the sense of incompetence.
There are few things more boring than other people’s travel woes so I’ll keep my own to a minimum by way of illustration. We were off to Greece for a week’s break and birthday celebration. We joined the Biblical queues to check in our luggage, cleared security and then waited at the gate for five hours before being forced to queue for hours to go home again without our luggage. At no point, did anyone tell us anything, except to consult the airline’s website – which had also broken down.
I rang a fast-thinking travel agent who managed to reserve us the last few BA seats to the same place two days later but BA has since told me it will neither pay nor even reimburse the cost of these new seats – on its own plane – on the grounds that they were ‘booked by a travel agent’. The computer, a human explained, would simply not allow it. If we took these seats, we’d therefore be liable for the eyewatering full fare. BA have now rebooked us on another flight later in the week. We should get there just in time to have a swim, turn round and come home again. I’m tempted to write off the whole trip but my children are determined to go even if it’s just for a day or two.
As for all our luggage, no one has a clue. Last night, after waiting precisely 102 minutes to give our luggage details to a man in Delhi, he interrupted me to say that his system, had collapsed. He added: ‘Try again in the morning’.
Others were in a much unhappier situation – the elderly, the ill, people with screaming babies, those missing a major family moment, those stranded thousands of miles from home with little or no English and, monstrously, no one to turn to. Even if you did find a BA operative handing out customer info, it was only in English. At least we could just go home. Others had to fight their way on to public trans- port or join the longest taxi queue I have ever seen and seek a hotel bed somewhere in London.
Right at the back of the queue, I found Sue and Greg Talford from Texas, embarking on a Herculean wait for a cab while Sue’s 94-yearold father, Willard Nielsen, sat in his wheelchair nearby. They had been on their way home from a trip to Willard’s ancestral homeland, Sweden. It will now be remembered for other reasons. ‘No one’s told us anything. It’s scary that there’s just no sort of back-up,’ sighed Sue.
It was clear that Heathrow was in trouble when we arrived midmorning to find the Terminal Five queues snaking out of the door. For all its fancy-pants, award-winning architecture, Terminal Five is a grim automated experience at the best of times. If you are running late for a flight, scanners simply block your entry. There is no human to whom you can appeal. Stress levels were already stratospheric before people had made it to the X-ray machines.
AT the departure gates, BA staff were already in a flap. ‘ It’s all gone wrong. And that’s not your plane,’ said a BA lady, pointing at the plane beneath our gate while tapping away pointlessly on a dead computer.
A decision had been made to tell the punters that all BA flights were ‘delayed’, leaving everyone waiting and wondering. ‘Take a seat,’ said the message on the screens. A one hour delay, followed by another hour, then another. Then the handful of BA staff on show disappeared, explaining it was the end of their shift. Of course it was. Perish the thought that anyone might go ‘over time’ in a crisis.
Disgracefully, it was only thanks to the telly – tuned in to the news channels with subtitles – that we learned that everything had actually been cancelled. At which point, there were queues around the block for anything resembling a BA desk. Eventually, a sheepish voice came over the loudspeakers to say that everything was, indeed, cancelled. And that was it. Not a squeak about what to do next. The screens said ‘please wait’. Passing BA staff told us to leave, muttering something about ‘ cyber attacks’. The only way out was via ‘ Gate 12’. Whereupon the herd fought its way – for many long hours – to leave through a single gate and then queue again to get through Passport Control and then queue again for a train or cab.
It wasn’t so long ago that BA would market itself as ‘the world’s favourite airline’ with a bogus coat of arms and the motto: ‘To fly. To serve’. It used to have a cheesy but catchy jingle (adapted by the England football team): ‘ We’ll take more care of you – fly the flag/ fly the flag.’
Today, it’s manifestly not the world’s favourite airline, primarily serves itself and takes as much ‘care of you’ as a speak-your-weight machine.
As for flying the flag, it’s a white one.