How sad….

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Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 42 total)

  • icenspice
    Participant

    That is very interesting, nevereconomy. I live on the continent and these ex-EU fares via LHR mean nothing to me.

    Others believe the real cost of flying has dropped. I completely disagree.

    Well, that goes without saying….some people are tied to BA.

    Sorry, a bit bitty piecy but I have a longhaul Y soon and my nerves are more frazzled than usual ?


    LuganoPirate
    Participant

    It is sad, but today it’s all about extracting the most from passengers while delivering the minimum. As long as they get you from A to B safely its job done and contract fulfilled.


    MrMichael
    Participant

    @Icenspice……I look forward to it.


    @FDOS
    , I had to google that one, and the answer is of course not. Are you suggesting that BA are exploiting immigrants, or are treating people in any way that is demeaning or illegal or immoral? Surely all they are doing is directing their staff to make a charge to customers for items off a trolley. Pax and staff alike might not like it, but it is a perfectly reasonable business decision and reasonable for the employer to instruct the employee to carry out that instruction.

    I empower my staff, I find that is the best way to manage staff and process and ensure consistency for customers. Empowerment does not extend however to managing business decisions, happy for them to input in to them, happy for them to make decisions in accordance with their area of responsibility, but ultimately we all have a choice.


    FDOS_UK
    Participant

    MrMichael

    My question was not, in any shape or form, about BA, but your attitude to what acceptable captalism looks like.

    Sometimes it reads, at least to me, as scoping in what I would not consider to be good practice.

    For what it’s worth, Rachman sometimes broke laws and sometimes didn’t, but the Rent Act was introduced because of him.

    Personally, I think he was a stinking pile of sh*t masquerading as a human being, who epxloited vulnerable people.


    MrMichael
    Participant

    My take on capitalism is that it works, but I also think society has a duty to look after the vulnerable and less lucky in the world. I won the lottery 56 years ago when I was born as a UK citizen, so many in life did not win anything the day they were born. I go out of my way to support those less lucky than myself. I believe we all have a duty in the western world to help our friends and neighbours less fortunate than ourselves, and business has to pay its fair share in paying people a decent wage for the work they do and by treating its employeees with respect, compassion and dignity. I would not work or do business with a company that exploits people. That’s why I do not shop at Primark and a few others nor would I want to hold shares in them.

    I think it sad all the people that worked for BMI too, they lost their jobs not through choice as has the lady the OP refers, but because the managers of that business ended up failing themselves, the airline, the thousands of staff that relied on their employer to pay their mortgages and the passengers. And why? Because they failed to adapt to market conditions and still lived in the past. Let’s hope those that do work for BA have a long term future of solid jobs with decent wages (not top notch maybe) that can stay employed for as long as they want if they want to. That’s the way to support people…..a solid, lasting successful business model.


    icenspice
    Participant

    So I take it immigration was not top of your agenda when you voted for Brexit. Much like me.


    WillieWelsh
    Participant

    [quote quote=765482]My take on capitalism is that it works, but I also think society has a duty to look after the vulnerable and less lucky in the world. I won the lottery 56 years ago when I was born as a UK citizen, so many in life did not win anything the day they were born. I go out of my way to support those less lucky than myself. I believe we all have a duty in the western world to help our friends and neighbours less fortunate than ourselves, and business has to pay its fair share in paying people a decent wage for the work they do and by treating its employeees with respect, compassion and dignity. I would not work or do business with a company that exploits people. That’s why I do not shop at Primark and a few others nor would I want to hold shares in them.

    I think it sad all the people that worked for BMI too, they lost their jobs not through choice as has the lady the OP refers, but because the managers of that business ended up failing themselves, the airline, the thousands of staff that relied on their employer to pay their mortgages and the passengers. And why? Because they failed to adapt to market conditions and still lived in the past. Let’s hope those that do work for BA have a long term future of solid jobs with decent wages (not top notch maybe) that can stay employed for as long as they want if they want to. That’s the way to support people…..a solid, lasting successful business model.

    [/quote]

    In your earlier post you ask if BA has done anything immoral and then in this one you talk about exploiting people. Is not the fact that Willie Walsh earns more in a day than new cabin crew earn in a year amoral and a serious case of exploitation? Is that not exactly what Theresa May has in her sights as being one of the major causes of discontent to the UK along with people believing they are ripped off at every turn by big business?

    As for BMI, they lost their way and were badly managed I will agree but badly managed from the point at which Nigel Turner, an accountant by profession took control when he and his people failed to listen to their staff at all levels though he made a big thing of his door always being open and being called Nigel by staff – I suspect they had other names for him.

    He tried to turn BD into a budget operation at LHR, delivered a confused product so that in the end you didn’t know what you were getting and killed it with a thousand cuts. Then he bought out BMED and confused the offering even further abandoning routes that had been bread and butter for years as they were not generating ‘sufficient profit’ though of course they were paying the bills.

    Sound familiar?

    He used all the same arguments that Cruz is using now particularly that things like BoB were what people wanted, to reduce standards at BA demonstrating he has learned nothing from the past.

    BD stayed in business so long because people were loyal to the brand and I count myself among them, it was a niche carrier that didn’t need to sell on price and in many ways without the market vulnerability BA has with all its transfer traffic through the hell of T5 or worse a T3/T5 transfer.


    stevescoots
    Participant

    Generalizing a little but accountants and engineers should never chair companies other than Accounting and Engineering Companies. I mean no disrespect to any of you here that are from those professions but accountants count beans and absolutely must have the ear of the chairperson (I miss the days when you could just say chairman no matter who sat in it) Engineers are never happy with the finished product, no matter how good it is and that creates havoc getting anything to market

    I am going to duck and run for cover!

    I have been a loyal customer for BA for many years now and am not surprised by this latest service development. I do feel for the crew because a lot of passengers are going to be very unhappy, but let’s face it, the complimentary offering in Economy is awful, and only slightly better in CE. Where they have gone badly wrong is in not at least handing out water and tea for free; or giving their Elites a free biscuit or the like. Time will tell whether this move is economically sensible, but the brand will be irreparably damaged , particularly given that many other carriers (especially across the pond) are upgrading their offering.


    canucklad
    Participant

    Morning MrMichael
    John Lewis is a perfect example of how social responsibility, employee empowerment and pride in the business produces consistently good results that are the envy of many a company in our capitalist system.
    And here’s the contradiction and enigma that you’d find yourself.
    The partners are successful because they’re not greedy. And focus on their strength, which is quality, delivered with consistently great customer service.

    I wonder what would happen if JL traded on the stock exchange and became answerable to shareholders who were only interested in the size of their next dividend.
    And the workers contributions to decision making was diluted, leaving it to a CEO who focusses on the cities short term fragilities rather than the bigger picture long term.

    @Willie Welsh…. Your BD comments were spot on


    JohnHarper
    Participant

    Ah yes, the Nigel days at BD.

    IIRC one of his first ‘enhancements’ was to stop the through check in of bags on separate BD tickets in an attempt to force people traveling from the UK regions – a big part of BD’s business to buy more expensive through tickets. It generated chaos at LHR with huge numbers of bags being claimed and checked in again, large additional numbers of people going through security, a huge loss of good will from people who had been loyal to BD for years and generally a perceived cheapening of the product which had been classy.

    Then the cabin service was reduced and reduced and reduced until eventually his famous survey of a thousand people demonstrated that people wanted buy on board. I was a very frequent BD traveler at the time and I asked everyone I met if they had been surveyed but none had. As a DC Gold I thought I might have been.

    Then business class was reduced in standard and finally removed from short haul leaving no choice for those who wanted a little extra and were willing to pay for it. You could still pay a bit more to sit at the front and have a free sandwich but in the end even that was done away with.

    As WillieWelsh says, ‘sound familiar?’

    The first thing LH did when forced to buy out BD was oust Nigel and begin to reverse some of his actions however as we all now know LH did not have the capacity to deal with two failing airlines in one go and they prioritised the turn around of Austrian and let BD go, something it is now well known that they and the wider *A regret bitterly.

    I have never and will never have an accountant on my board, I will listen to their advice and maybe even follow it sometimes but they are only really there to do the sums!


    CathayLoyalist2
    Participant

    Mr.Michael, it is indeed sad when any loyal worker leaves because standards have dropped and will continue to drop at BA so I admire her, and others, for doing so. I could understand the time for her to move on if she was baulking at raising standards but she isn’t. Steve Jobs famously said “People who come to work just want to do great work” so isn’t that the responsibility of BA to ensure that managers facilitate that? The bigger picture here is BA’s supposed leaders and managers appear to have absolutely no idea how to lead/manage or motivate their people and certainly do not listen to them. BA comically say that the product changes resulted from customer feedback so I guess that’s a bit like “Turkeys voting for Christmas! Mountains of research show that employees who are respected, valued and listened to help to improve the bottom line because they are proud to work for their companies.I assume you would you be comfortable with running a company that had no qualms about treating your people with distain? If so that is indeed sad


    TimFitzgeraldTC
    Participant

    I think BA’s problem is that they have no idea what service proposition they want to deliver in 10 years time. They seem to have no long term strategy other than to maximize bonuses for management who won’t have to pick up the pieces in 10 years time as they’ll be long one gone. It seems to be run on a personal greed basis which will never be a viable long term business.

    To me it is just So sad as the thread is titled. I agree with JH on other posts. I want to step on a BA plane that represents the best of British values and makes you feel proud to be British. I want to think I’ll fly BA and no one else. Sadly it is ABBA as my first choice as the product just sucks (if it was for Premium travel). And service you could argue is representing Britain – a ton of loyal workers being replaced by staff who couldn’t give a t**s about the long term survival of BA or its customers as a means to get pay for 3 years whilst they figure out what to do with their lives before moving onto something more meaningful.

    So yep – they might be doing nicely in the City at the moment and giving shareholders a decent return ( I have no idea if they are). But it is a crap indictment of our society if we judge Businesses by what the City thinks as they can’t focus beyond the end of the week (or the class A’s that those people chuck up their noses on a daily basis). Do we really want to trust these eegits as to what is successful?


    seasonedtraveller
    Participant

    Travelled yesterday on BA189 (787 service) in CW and I’m really sorry to say that the service and crew in the CW cabin were, to be very blunt, bloody awful.
    ‘To fly to serve’ my backside.

    Crew not at all interested in passenger service but couldn’t wait to dash back to the galley to carry on their conversations in voices loud enough for all to hear. Lady seated in the middle section actually asked them to keep the noise down at one point.
    The crew were completely absent following dinner and did not appear again until ‘afternoon tea’.

    I was not the only one to notice.
    In the line for immigration, the chap in front of me seated on the opposite side in row 7 turned to me and said “weren’t today’s crew awful & so miserable”?

    Despite what’s going on at BA I think cabin crew should display a level of professionalism as was shown last week when it was an absolute pleasure to be served by crew who truly deserved a golden ticket (although if there is any value left in handing these things out any more is not known to me).


    MartynSinclair
    Participant

    Rather innovative way for crew to block off the overhead bins above row 1 in Club Europe..

    And yes, although the passenger in row 1 could not use the bin, it was deemed safe enough for use by crew bags.

    Absolutely miserable cabin crew operating the flight..

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 42 total)
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