A high-tech, hassle free travel experience in Heathrow Terminal 5 turned out to be a nightmare to all the passengers.
Telegraph has already listed the chaos in the list of top PR blunders.
"It was a PR disaster', Telegraph comments, "the airline and airport appeared to be blaming each other for the emerging chaos".
And "according to BA insiders, the airline's press officers working out of the company's Waterside headquarters were not trying to spin their way out of bad news".
"The sad truth is they had as little idea of what was going on at Terminal 5 about a mile away as the passengers who were engulfed in the shambles itself."
Finally, BA's CEO, Willie Walsh appeared on TV to apologize the current mass, who performed far better than his colleague Gareth Kirkwood, the airline's director of operations, who was described as "the original rabbit dazzled by the headlights".
"He read a statement and then scuttled off at some speed, accompanied by his minder, refusing to take any questions".
In this case, BA's website and its online press centre within in play an important role. The link of updated information is on the home page. Passengers are advised to check latest arrivals and departures information before they travel to the airport.
Speaking of its online press centre, however, news are not updated on daily basis. Specific tactics dedicated to the crisis are not well stated to journalist. Therefore, they could not blame journalists for using their own angles to tell stories.
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6 comments:
Sherry you talk about a topic that created me a lot of problems!!!!!!!!!
"We always knew the first day would represent a unique challenge because of the size and complexity of the move into Terminal 5," said the British Airways director of operations, Gareth Kirkwood. "We are working extremely hard on solutions to these short-term difficulties."
Short term difficulties? 10 days after the first operation of terminal 5 problems still exist. I personally faced this situation and i believe BA didn't use any PR techniques. The people working at the airport of Edinburgh had no idea about was is going on in Heathrow, the headquarters didn't give access to data, no internal communication!!
The only thing that used is the word " SORRY". The answer for the lost baggages was soory we cant help you. And the request for any actions to help us or inform us was " Cross your fingers and pray". Even if Itried to contact them through telephone the lines were always buzy and the mail box was full ( use extra lines to let people contact you??????).
So i think that British Airways failed to face this crisis and couldnt use the media offered.
What they are going to do now????
I couldn´t agree more with you Giota on this topic. An absolute PR disaster. Of all the communication options available BA decided to use the much maligned "heads in the sand" approach!
Incredible that a big corporation like BA didn't prepare better for this major event but when you think of all the big name blunders through the years...well!
Not surprisingly one Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations, has been given the boot along with David Noyes, director of customer services. To rub their inadequacy in even further, the duo will apparently be replaced by one person covering both posts. Strangely, there's no mention of the head of communications getting the boot.
But such is the scale of this disaster that three major insurance sellers, Direct Line, Churchill and Tesco, currently do not offer lost baggage cover for people travelling with BA until the terminal is running properly.
And don't even mention all the repercussions this major ****up is having on all the other airlines that intended to use Terminal 4 once BA had moved into Terminal 5...
An interesting aspect from a PR technology perspective, I think, is that ITV (in the first YouTube video) uses information from an internet chat room for pilots as a source in their critic. I think it shows two things: 1) Discussion among employees/colleagues/publics are increasingly taking place online, 2) Journalists are paying attention, 3) Companies (PR professionals) also have to pay attention, to know what is going on.
I can't help but wonder whether PR people could have done more then they did.. It was obviously a complete nightmare, people were raging, and the key players (such as the CEO) are obviously incompetent. It might just be that PR people had their hands tied. There was a pressure of giving accurate and timely information to angry passengers, and the leadership of the company apparently had no information or any idea of what was happening. So, what do you do in such situation? The Director of Operations refuses to take questions from journalists – are you supposed to act as an embarrassed parent of a bad behaved brat?
As their Head of Corporate Communications said: "if a customer-facing operation disintegrates in front of the massed media there is no PR guru in the world who can save your bacon."
The only thing that gets me even more mad is that similar incidents will probably occur again in the future. It is what we call " a oligarchy market"! I' m sorry for Giota's adventure but when so few companies are operating in certain international destinations and they are aware that most of their customers will not switch air companies due to the cost there not many solutions...
I mentioned Carrefour China is boycotting by Chinese netizens. Now the crisis is getting worse. Several most famous Chinese searching engines, which including Google China and Yahoo China are boycotting Carrefour China now, by blocking all the web pages, news, even pictures and blogs regarding the term ‘Carrefour’ in Chinese.
vumoofree.net
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