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When It All Goes Pear Shaped

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I’m not sure if it was irony or simply coincidence that I was editing an interview with Harvard Business School’s David Garvin on a flight to London last Thursday. The focus of the interview was Garvin’s work on the imperative for executives to focus attention on implementation. I wish I’d forwarded a draft to British Airways before my flight as what I encountered when I landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5  was what the Brits would call a proper cock up. I arrived in the evening and was to meet my niece for a connecting flight to Paris. That flight and all others to Paris that evening were cancelled because of thunderstorms in the area.

Bad weather is a fact of life. If the cancellation had happened in the States the airline would have been under no obligation to do anything at all. To its credit, BA did try to do something — they just did it so incredibly poorly that it may have been worse than nothing at all. The personnel on the ground were completely overwhelmed and seemed to often be working at cross-purposes. Survival to the end of the shift rather than true customer service seem to be their principal focus. The details:

I was first sent to Level 3, Area G with instructions to look for someone handling business class passengers. I followed instructions and found a mass of people queued to resolve their flight issues and get a hotel voucher for the night. There was no area for business class passengers though as a result of my search I wound up near the front of the line at one of the desks. Just three passengers from my voucher, I was asked by a BA representative if I’d rebooked my flight yet. I told her no and was then told to get out of line and head for Area E. All through this time I was trying to reach my niece by phone to no avail. Arriving at Area E I found another long queue. Before I could join it I was blocked by a BA representative telling several of us who had come from Area G that the queue was now closed and that we’d have to return at 5:00 a.m. to resolve things. Area G was also closing we were told. We were handed little booklets with a list of area hotels and their phone numbers.

Angry as I was at being left high-and-dry, my attention now was on finding my niece. My phone calls went unanswered though I did get an email telling me that her flight had been delayed two hours. Whew! She was likely in the air. There was no listing of her flight on the arrivals board (as it turns out, her flight was to arrive at Terminal 1). I tried to approach multiple BA representatives for help but they were doing their best to avoid engaging with anymore angry passengers. “This station is closed,” I was told more than once. Finally I had to grab a gentleman who appeared to be a manager. “I’ve got a lost minor.” I told him. “I need help.” That was a bit of white lie as my niece is 20 but she is not an experienced international traveler and had never before been to Heathrow. The only help he could provide was to direct me to the information desk of Level 1 where I could have her paged.

The people at the information desk were eager to help if a bit clueless. They were the ones who told me that my niece’s flight would arrive at Terminal 1 and suggested that I go there. “What if she’s landed and is on her way here?” I asked.  ‘That perplexed them They did manage to find the information on the flight — it had recently landed. They took a description of my niece and I started to race to Terminal 1. Just as the Heathrow Express train was about to depart, my niece called. She was on Level 3 of Terminal 5. I shoved my bag into the closing doors just in time. When they opened, I sprinted as best I could back upstairs.

I found my niece in the Vodaphone shop where the clerk had let her borrow an adapter to charge her phone (thank you, Vodaphone!). One problem solved. We headed back toward Area G where there were still BA representatives attending to a long queue. There were enough people yelling that I simply tried to listen to the advice being given and remain polite, They did indeed have hotel vouchers… but the last of them went to person just in front of us. We were once again on our own though we did learn how to submit receipts for reimbursement, the financial limits of reimbursement, etc. I left my niece in the queue just in case while I found a seat and booted up my tablet. Fortunately I had two devices as Heathrow only allows 45 minutes of free Internet access (Why? Why? Why?) and my allotment for my phone had expired. In a few minutes I had booked a hotel near the airport.

It was more than an hour by the time we’d made our way to the hotel and been given a room at the Best Western Plus Park Grand Hotel London Heathrow (try to say that three times fast). Though it did take awhile to prepare a room with two beds (which had been shown as available on the Web), the staff here were friendly and helpful. The hotel was much better than expected: well-appointed, recently renovated from what we could see, free Internet). Once in the room and back online, we could see that my flight had been automatically rebooked but that my niece had to call to resolve hers. That took almost another hour as the call center was clearly overwhelmed as well. By some miracle we were able to get on the same flight though we’d need to be up in four hours to get back to Heathrow.

I will, I hope, be reimbursed for the cost of the hotel in London. There was no way to recover the cost of the prepaid room I’d arranged at the Best Western near CDG for that evening. I am back on BA today (writing this the Admiral’s Club lounge at CDG waiting for a flight to Heathrow and then back to Boston). All seems quiet. Fingers are crossed. I am disappointed that BA did such a poor job at its home airport. They should have better plans in place — rehearsed and drilled thoroughly — to be able to handle a large number of cancellations. There were too few people to handle the onslaught, no way to give passengers some reassurance that would calm them, and insufficient options for resolving traveler’s issues.  Having worked in customer facing positions early in my career and a student of service ever since, I know that you need people who are properly supported and empowered to solve problems, not a team frozen in paralysis by procedure. There was too little concern about a missing person; had I not found her, I’d be writing this with a flamethrower. Terminal 5 is a gleaming wonder but the implementation of service recovery in this case simply failed.

I fly with BA often and am generally impressed with their personnel. I was praising them on Twitter recently for getting me to and from Dubai on time in comfort and on time. The true test of an airline — of any organization — is not how well it does in normal conditions, but rather how it responds when things go pear-shaped as they did last Thursday evening. Fortunately I am a seasoned traveler with credit cards so I knew I’d be fine. Not all travelers are so equipped. British Airways, take note — there are lessons here to learn. You can, and must, do better in the future.

Photo: Wikipedia Commons. Josh Hallett from Winter Haven, FL, USA


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