Archive for the 'BA' Category

Ever had to get a taxi from Heathrow, but not into London? Then you’ll know this story. Its happened to me twice recently. Fixed fares. What that means is the taxi driver gets £40 i.e. the fare back into central London, Regardless of a short local journey e.g. 5 miles.

Is this the way to represent the UK at its foremost border post?

When asking taxi driver, taxi wallah, taxi desk, BAA desk, the answers are the both the same and different.

Where they are the same is that it’s not their fault, they don’t know who you take it up with and sorry but nothing you can do about it. Where they differ is who made them do it.

So  maybe I should send an open letter to all those who were cited as causing the poor taxi driver to have to charge £40. Dear Lord Mayor of London, CEO of BAA ( hola!) and Chief Constable of Surrey Constabulary. Of and all taxi drivers.

Snr CEO – Why do BAA charge taxi drivers £5.50 to pick up customers. Surely your airport would be rubbish without taxis.

If local runs are not what taxi drivers want because they’ve sat 2 hours waiting to get to the head of the queue, why not have 2 taxi ranks – London cabs and local taxis rather than a monopoly on cabs?

Mr Lord Mayor, why should you allow tourists and business men who aren’t going to central London to have their first rip off experience of London in their first hour in UK?

Taxi drivers – if your time is so valuable, why not just drive straight back to London rather than sit in a queue for 2 hours? And do a local fare on your way out please

Mr Chief Constable – I think you’re forgiven as the taxi driver just made that up….

BA, Customer satisfaction, taxis | No Comments

Gareth Kirkwood and David Noyes at BA made the papers in a way that any operations or customer services director would prefer not to. Terminal 5’s launch may have been a disaster, but could it have been avoided? What could they have done differently?

Yes, listen to what your staff are saying – according to the papers.

It appears that many staff were saying they weren’t trained, rehearsed or just plain didn’t know their way round. And they had told management so. Then with a feeling of lack of transparency growing, customers and the newspapers went to town on the issues.

Backed up by word of mouth, a whirlwind developed. I only know 2 people who got held up or lost bags or both. But interestingly my daughter said there was nowhere to sit, too many shops (and that’s a first for her…) and many shops didn’t have stock – that being 2 weeks after launch.

As a customer, evidently it isn’t part of BA’s culture to listen. I’ve tried giving feedback a couple of times at the airport. The staff direct you to the website. When I say I don’t get a response that way, they have no options or alternatives.

And if you’re from Virgin, don’t feel smug. They’ll take the feedback but it doesn’t change anything e.g. the staffing of desks for self service check in or premium economy haven’t changed over time.

So the incoming replacements may want to consider how they can implement systematic listening as a process…..cue what our customers are saying

BA, Virgin, WOCAS, airlines | No Comments

Why do so many websites not work? Eurostar’s never seems to work. You have to phone up, ask them not to charge you £5 for the privilege of buying a ticket from them because their site won’t take a booking for free.

Here’s a good one – it asks you to fill in the origin of the journey, but the box for that is missing.

The staff are obviously used to the web site not working, because they don’t ask what the problem is, or remotely suggest that they are interested in getting it fixed (that’s one for the WOCAS process www.budd.uk.com/wocas.html ). Feedback from customers and agents, so powerful but so few companies are geared up to use it – fast+systematically.

Still at least it was simple to find the Eurostar phone number under customer support.

Unlike Virgin Trains which couldn’t accept my postcode ( I assure you I do live at my home address! ) and so I couldn’t buy a ticket. No easy opt out to get help, but heh, no choice so why do they care. Unless I opted to go by air, using up all my “green” creds, I’d have to buy at the station anyway.

But it doesn’t get any better by plane. I haven’t been able to get onto the BA site to check in in the last hour. Seems like the site is down completely.

BA, Eurostar, Virgin, broken websites | 2 Comments