British Airways: a company in meltdown?

“In the past, this country had just reason to be proud of British Airways,” once known as the “world’s favourite airline”, said the Daily Mail. “After this weekend’s computer meltdown, that good name lies in tatters, bringing shame on the flag emblazoned on BA tail fins.” On Saturday, the company suffered a “catastrophic” worldwide IT failure. More than 1,000 flights were cancelled or delayed, affecting 75,000 people, many at Heathrow, on one of the busiest weekends of the year. It was bad enough that such a failure could happen in the first place. But unforgivably, tens of thousands of distraught customers were left for hours without information, “while staff clocked off as usual at the end of their shifts”. Telephone lines, jammed all day, closed at 8pm, leaving travellers in the dark as to how to make their journeys, or reclaim missing luggage.

“On the scant information available so far, there appears to be no good excuse for the crippling IT failure,” said the FT. Álex Cruz, the airline’s chief executive, blamed a “power supply issue” (he denied that a cyberattack was involved). BA’S backup systems must be “woefully deficient” if they cannot withstand a power cut. But the subsequent failures were even harder to explain. People can be “remarkably tolerant” of long delays when this information is clearly communicated and accompanied by efforts to limit the inconvenience. BA managed none of this. It failed “on all fronts”, agreed The Times: basic competence, contingency planning and, above all, customer relations. Its PR efforts consisted of “smarmy clichés”: Cruz donned a high-vis jacket for a public announcement, as if he were “personally fixing the computers”. Desperate customers calling helplines were left hanging on the phone, and charged 55p per minute.

BA appears to be in meltdown, said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. It has suffered a series of IT disasters and staff strikes, while customer service is in sharp decline. The problem is that the airline has been “hammering away at costs, outsourcing IT departments, laying off staff, and chipping away at passenger perks” such as free food on shorthaul flights. It doesn’t have much choice: low-cost competitors such as Ryanair have turned the market upside down. But some companies are “brilliant at cutting costs” – Amazon, John Lewis and Dyson have all done it without sacrificing quality – while others, such as Whsmith, “just grind themselves into oblivion”. British Airways was once a “great brand”. But it won’t be for much longer unless it finds a way to compete without “abandoning quality and service”.