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Updated: Terminal 5 a Tough Test for British Airways
It's been a rough week for British Airways. The opening of its mammoth Terminal 5 operation on March 27 at Heathrow Airport didn't go as smoothly as planned. Due to computer, baggage, and staff issues, the airline has canceled 200 flights and has a backlog of more than 150,000 pieces of luggage. It must be very frustrating for travelers. But British Airways has earned a reputation for top-notch customer care, so I think most of its customers will forgive BA for this and continue to fly with the airline.
Building a culture where the customer is put first and trust is earned goes a long way when something negative happens. British Airways has successfully built customer loyalty and trust, which can be a bond not easily broken. It's the perfect prevention plan for when something as traumatic as Terminal 5's first few days occurs.
In today's issue of 1to1 Weekly, we talk to Director of Relationship Marketing Peter Schinasi. He relays the importance of building a strong personal connection with flyers. Earning customer trust, Schinasi says, is a mixture of people, process, and technology all working together toward a common goal.
How does your company work to build trust with customers and employees? How integral is trust to your firm’s customer strategy?
This is a horror story of the first order. BA lost all our baggage on a flight to Paris 2 years ago. The bags did not arrive with our flight from Heathrow. We were OK with that because the connection was tight and this happens. We were later called by their representative and told that the bags had been found and were on the way to our apartment--one bag actually arrived.
When we inquired the next day as to the whereabout of our other 3 bags we were casually told the truck carrying them had been stolen! WHAT!
We thought it was a joke. We estimate that we lost over $11k worth of cloths and gear and to this day we have received no acknowledgment from BA that the event even occurred.
We have been unable to claim on insurance because BA would not give us a police report stating that the truck had been stolen. Needless to say we don't travel with BA unless we absolutely have to and we tell this story to anyone willing to listen. On Fred Reichheld's NPS scale BA gets a big ZERO from me.
SUCCESS!
Wilkommen im Wien! Welcome in Vienna, and my luggage arrived safely, along with everyone else's.
In fact, the captain came on the coms line in the plane before we pushed from the gate at Heathrow to tell us that he had confirmed everyone's luggage was on board. That was a highly customer-oriented announcement to make, because he obviously knew that everyone on the plane had a few pangs of anxiety about checking their bags. I don't think I've ever heard a captain announce that all the bags were accounted for, although with all the computer tracking of bags now, there's no reason why it couldn't be done as a matter of course, or at least whenever there was any doubt about the baggage situation.
Nevertheless, I'm returning from Vienna in two days on an American airline, and I'm looking forward to being able to carry everything on, once again.
Wish me luck! I am now sitting in the British Airways Executive Club lounge at Terminal 5, on my way to Vienna. It is palatial. Stupendous. Indescribably modern and comfortable. For all the flight cancellation problems and delayed luggage nightmares that you may have read about with the opening of Terminal 5, the truth is that the interior is fantastic, and the business-traveler lounge is to-die-for gorgeous.
But here’s why I need luck: I was required to check a piece of luggage. I have carried this standard-size Travel-Pro rollerboard on board at virtually every other airport in the world, bar none, for the ten years I’ve owned it, but apparently it is still an inch too large to fit inside the Byzantine metal framework set up by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to check your carry-on luggage size. A big problem with travel into and out of London is that all the airports are under the tyrannical rule of the highly bureaucratic BAA. They had posted lots of young agents at various points in an effort to be helpful, but despite their smiles the truth is they aren’t very. Helpful, that is. They’re basically a nuisance, and they’re very good at it.
AND two of these young kids actually told me enthusiastically that it was the airline’s rule about how big the carry-on luggage could be, but I know differently. It’s a BAA rule, which anyone can look up here. They should be ashamed for trying to shift the blame.
It’s no wonder that British Airways has had such a hard time getting Terminal 5 smoothly into operation, with such a dysfunctional partner as BAA. I’m sure there’s no shortage of blame to go around, but I’ll wager the problems wouldn’t have been half as bad if British Airways were able to rely on a business-like, results-oriented airport partner, rather than a slow-moving, all-knowing-and-we-told-you-so government bureaucracy whose own people are (how shall I put it?) “prone to misstatement” for whatever reason.
Still, one of the counter people told me my luggage had a “very good” chance to get to Vienna on my flight today, as most of the problems had by now been tackled and resolved. Another told me, more ominously, that my chances were about 60-40. So we shall see.
When I arrive in Vienna I’ll post a comment to tell you how it turned out!
I just read your BA piece. It was the half that were holding their breath that were right about T5. It’s going to be fascinating to see how well, or badly, BA recover from the disastrous first few days of T5 operation. Don’s quote in the article should be handed to every member of BA’s and BAA staff.
London-born supermodel Naomi Campbell was arrested late Thursday on suspicion of assaulting an officer after police were called to a disturbance at Heathrow's new Terminal 5. Witnesses said Campbell was aboard a British Airways plane due to depart for Los Angeles when she became involved in a dispute over her luggage.
Campbell's spokeswoman, Annabel Fox, said Campbell was traveling to the U.S. to attend a memorial service and had boarded the plane when she was told one of her two checked bags was missing.
British Airways "decided to resolve this by insisting she leave the flight and then called the police to forcibly eject her," Fox said.
We're getting lots of similar comments on the BA situation. Terminal 5 was just too much of a SNAFU to overcome for some customers. It will be interesting to see if BA's bottom line and customer numbers drop when the Terminal 5 dust settles.
It's a tough situation for BA to be in. I hope for their customers' sake they react to such a negative incident with a customer focus.
I think you may be underestimating the damage that Terminal 5 is doing to BA's brand. I'm a loyal customer so I thought any teething problems would be sorted when I booked a flight for one week after opening. When I heard that domestic flights are still being cancelled my first solution was to shift to another London terminal. Unfortunately several other travellers seem to have had the same idea so BA has now lost my business to a train provider in this instance.
This comes after a recent experience of BA not making sufficient amends for a much more minor mishap when a flight I was on was not catered.
The strategy and the intention may be spot on and the brand may be strong but continued failures of execution will cause major damage.