British Airways: raking over the ashes
After last week’s reputational trashing, the news keeps getting worse for British Airways, said Mark Hookham in The Sunday Times. Cabin crew affiliated to the Unite union are planning to strike for four days later this month over pay. Meanwhile, cost-cutting and poor service mean that industry experts Skytrax have threatened to strip the airline of its “four-star” status – “leaving it with a worse rating than Russia’s Aeroflot” and on “a par with Uzbekistan Airways, Ethiopian Airlines and Ryanair”.
BA’S explanation for how it came to strand 75,000 passengers was “about as solid as a paper aeroplane”, and the airline now faces compensation claims of up to £100m, said Neil Collins in the Financial Times. But shares in the airline’s parent, IAG, were back where they started within days. Clearly, “inflicting misery on passengers is not something that bothers investors unduly”. They tend to see IAG as one of a near “oligopoly” of long-haul carriers with a “powerful position in a growing industry” – so who cares about standards? Given the growing threat from “subsidised Middle Eastern carriers” on long haul, and the “drubbing inflicted on BA by the low-cost carriers in Europe”, that could prove short-sighted.
Michael O’leary of Ryanair “couldn’t resist a Twitter dig at BA’S plight”, just ahead of his announcement of record profits of s1.3bn for the year to March, said Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator. He’d be wiser to test his own backup systems, “rather than indulging in schadenfreude”. Still, O’leary seems to have got things right on IT. Ryanair is a “paragon of thrift”, but one thing it hasn’t skimped on is investment in its digital operations, said The Economist. Unlike BA, it seems, O’leary views “slashing spending on IT systems” as a “false economy”. He’s right.