It’s not funny for the stranded passengers but I am afraid I clutched my sides when I read this from Marketing Week:
Top BA marketers roll up sleeves to clear T5 chaos
“British Airways has been forced to draft its top marketers onto the shop floor as part of the efforts to alleviate the chaos at Terminal 5.
Tiffany Hall, BA’s head of marketing and distribution, and Stuart Beamish, head of loyalty, in charge of BA Miles and Executive Club, have joined volunteer teams helping staff working in the terminal, as they try to restore the airline’s battered reputation.”
Yes, it’s peripheral to the situation and no, it won’t get people reunited with their bags any quicker, but there is just so much to say about the online side of the T5 debacle and how badly the communications were set up.
And I seriously doubted whether I would have time to say it when Sky News phoned last Friday. There were also logistical (mainly geographical) problems to appearing on the show.
Fortunately Kevin May at Travolution was able to go on and did a great job, despite the remote control camera drifting skywards at one point – possibly in mute comment at BA’s ineptitude.
I was full of admiration for the way he handled the interview and relieved on my own behalf as, predictably, the questions bore little semblance to the discussion of BA’s online reputations which had gone on with the producer earlier. TV always does that to you. Never trust TV people. Particularly news. I know: I married one.
Anyway – I had a meeting with some of BA’s dot com execs last year when we talked about incorporating conversational media into the main site. Not necessarily full-blown, hippy-thinking, unwashed-hordes-at-the-gate forums but just the idea of a personal voice or two cutting through marketing-speak.
In the end (and I heavily paraphrase) they were too scared of adding anything to ba.com which did not drive traffic directly into the booking engine to countenance such a flippant waste of pixels and signal. Just like an awful lot of flights last week then, the idea didn’t fly.
How I wish BA would stop being so arrogant, come down from 33,000 feet and start engaging with us, their wallet-emptying passengers, in a meaningful, authentic and personal way.
It would have been a simple business to set up a blog way ahead of T5 opening – Eurostar did that (sort of) before the move to St Pancras. Apart from keeping us up-to-date with progress, problems, stellar efforts of staff and contractors, they then would have had an established – human, rapidly-updated – platform to use as part of their crisis comms. when it all went wrong.
But they didn’t. Instead we get the usual – Willie Walsh apologising to the national media on the lunchtime news – as well as the unusual, but highly deserved: the head of marketing chipping her nails (photo call anyone?) in the terminal while shipping your cases off to that great lost luggage depot in the east, a.k.a Italy.
{ 6 comments }
You’re too kind, Neil.
You’re too kind, Neil.
Hilarious and totally agree! Never has Dell Hell had such a close British comparison.
Hilarious and totally agree! Never has Dell Hell had such a close British comparison.
“How I wish BA would stop being so arrogant”
Never have. Never will.
They just lurch from one media disaster to the next wondering where their supporters have gone when the truth is, they never had any.
Ever since I became a travel journalist 20 years ago, BA have had a terrible reputation among colleagues for their arrogance. Maybe it’s something to do with the role of flag-carrier. They behave like our national stereotype; as petty officials. “Why do you want to know?” and “Are you important enough to receive this information?” have been the constant underlying themes in any engagement with BA’s press office.
I remember a large restaurant room full of travel transport journos being introduced to a fresh new BA head of PR after the ‘dirty tricks’ episode in 1993 (when a media-nimble Virgin ran rings around the fusty old-school PR machine of BA). It was to be a new dawn for BA corporate communications – friendly, approachable, lightweight, open, etc.
It never happened.
Never has…never will.
“How I wish BA would stop being so arrogant”
Never have. Never will.
They just lurch from one media disaster to the next wondering where their supporters have gone when the truth is, they never had any.
Ever since I became a travel journalist 20 years ago, BA have had a terrible reputation among colleagues for their arrogance. Maybe it’s something to do with the role of flag-carrier. They behave like our national stereotype; as petty officials. “Why do you want to know?” and “Are you important enough to receive this information?” have been the constant underlying themes in any engagement with BA’s press office.
I remember a large restaurant room full of travel & transport journos being introduced to a fresh new BA head of PR after the ‘dirty tricks’ episode in 1993 (when a media-nimble Virgin ran rings around the fusty old-school PR machine of BA). It was to be a new dawn for BA corporate communications – friendly, approachable, lightweight, open, etc.
It never happened.
Never has…never will.
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