A Very British Airline - BBC2 does BA
newda898
Posts: 5,466 Forum Member
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How are we finding it?
A totally different experience in the upper classes, my flights in Economy certainly were decidedly mediocre.
Quite watchable though.
A totally different experience in the upper classes, my flights in Economy certainly were decidedly mediocre.
Quite watchable though.
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Shame they don't check the condition of the short haul fleet cabin stsndard like they do for the a380 either. They might learn why others do it better.
When you pay that much for a ticket you expect decent food and everything that goes with it. That souflee was below par. Crazy thing to attempt to cook on a plane.
Marketing manager I believe.
It's just service really. You pay a lot of money, you expect good service and good food/wine. That's just how the service industry works. They're allowed to be snobbish. If they were served perfectly good decent food with nothing wrong with it and they pick holes just to be arses then yeah that's wrong but it sounded like the food wasn't as it should have been. I was only half paying attention however.
The training process may be tough but there's no shortage of people wanting to submit themselves to it.
I'm a big BA fan and try to fly with them whenever possible..
I can't believe that they 'needed a moment' when that guy got kicked off the course. I can see that they were stressed but the trainers laid it on thick.
They still act like they are the best in the world when they stopped being so a long time ago IMO. The crew are always great but everything around them is still a bit rough round the edges.
Rather than thinking what a great way to train new staff found BA’s training style depressing and bleak.
Brands and Marketing And Experience head
BA are a horrible entity to work for. Speaking from direct experience. The long term staff are like brainwashed cult members
Agree on other comments. BA product is still light years behind mid East airlines
Personally I wouldn't be too fussed about uniform or make-up standards as long as they are presentable; giving good service is more important to me. I also found the trainers' handling of the chap being terminated to be a bit over-the-top.
The two men in first class came over a bit pompous but that scene looked a bit set up. Having said that when you are paying a lot of money you have certain expectations.
There is no doubt that the likes of Emirates and Etihad have raised the bar when flying east but BA are still my first choice for European and transatlantic flights.
Looks so hard to be cabin crew now. I thought about doing it once but I don't think I could. Plus probably wouldn't take me because of my hearing problems. Maybe?
I LOVE flying and would love to do first class sometime. Although me and my Mum once sat in the 4th row of the plane but they just called it something else, not first class. Everything behind the first five row section was economy
and the thing is it looks it too, no wonder the staff are always grumpy, I did read a preview that characterised BA as the airline that would be far happier to fly planes without passengers and it has always felt like that when Ive flown with them.
the two guys in 1st class, tbf if you are paying that much money to fly first class, then yes you can be snotty about rubbish food, and he made a absolutely crucial point, that rather then spending two days on their hands and knees searching for scratches the staff should pay more notice of, the menu had too many options, and its a classic flaw in lots of restaurants with chefs who arent thinking of the practicalities of serving, simply what fabulous dishes they can dream up, and inevitably its harder to cook that many options properly, or serve them properly given the limitations of basically warmed up grub on plastic trays at 30,000ft.
Too right. On another tack, a 'delegate' (aka probationer) who'd obviously made the serious decision to give up a job do the training course was kicked off because...he was two minutes late? Victorian factory signs about fines for spitting or termination for spending too long in the lavatory come to mind. So that's what a 'mixed workforce' means.
And what's this about 'snapshots'? Four 'snapshots' and you're out? Why call them that? Happy holiday snaps turned nightmare, with overtones of photos you wish hadn't made it to facebook, but 'taken' in a supposedly professional training context where casualness is clearly the last thing on anyone's mind. And so the obviously keen, probably well suited, and certainly committed, guy goes for the stupidest of reasons because there can be no arguments with a snapshot: look what you did. The other recruits tremble. And the people who take the snapshots call in witnesses(!) to make sure it's all so transparent and, I imagine, look to their own snapshots in turn.
The power of surveillance. Orwell would not have been surprised. They will learn to love BA.
He wasn't kicked off for being two minutes late. He was kicked because he had had three warnings and that fourth one. They need high standards because many of the things the cabin crew are doing are safety related and a simple mistake can be costly for the airline. You would expect someone with three warnings to extra care not to do anything wrong.
I would think any company taking any sort of disciplinary action against a member of staff will want a witness to be present.
A friend used to be night porter at a very exclusive hotel. Most of the customers were fine and he was on first name terms with people from millionaires, Hollywood stars to a King. He made some very good friends. Often it is not the very wealthy who are a pain but when someone else is paying the bill..
What a way to earn a not very well rewarded living.
Still, I guess some must think it glamorous.
I know what you mean.
I did 12 years working my way up a multi-national and in the end I decided I'd already become too much of a clone for my liking and I got out.
I remember a colleague asking me why I'd resigned a 12 year career, 'Your last presentation, you showed a great command of the business', he said. 'No', I told him, 'it's now that I've learnt how to tell the story the way everyone likes it around here'.
In other words, I'd learned the script and had got competent at telling it the way everyone else read it / understood it (I'd been on assignment to Sydney for just over a year).
But, while I chose to get out, these people are choosing to buy into it; you choose to dance with the devil, you better learn the tune.
The guy wasn't let go because of one 2 minute infraction, it was his 4th and those were the terms.
Presumably they have many people who get through the training and more who pass than fail by a long shot (otherwise it's too inefficient / costly)?
Most of the training looked like learning loads of stuff by rote, hardly intellectually challenging; there was just a lot of it.
Maybe his leaving was a set up?
Lateness on a training course for the afternoon session when they are already there???
Where is there to go in those areas around Heathrow in a lunch hour? No-where.
Maybe the guy packed it in and they adjusted the way we were told the story?
Maybe he had had enough and did it deliberately?
Hate to be so suspicious but how many supposed reality shows or fly on the wall documentaries have we been shown where what we see is supposed to be the truth but we find out isn't?
That marketing guy was about as inspiring as the cheese soufle.
The airplane maintenance and scheduling people living their lives permanently at night but staying calm throughout were quite an interesting crowd.
Had any of them seen daylight any time recently?
Isn't that society today in a nutshell !!!!!!!!!! Good observation though.
The BA today is nothing like the BA of thirty/forty years ago. A lot less choosy for one.
I haven't flown with BA since the 1990s, but whenever I did (business class for work), the crew looked and sounded like they had a good education, and they certainly weren't obese. The latest uniform is beautiful, but looks far less so when stretched across a vast derriere. Does the weight in proportion to height rule no longer exist? I've known BA crew in the past who tried five or six times before being accepted. These were all well-spoken people with jobs in the hospitality industry, so you'd think would be exactly what BA were looking for, yet they had to persevere to get through. Some of last night's bunch make me wonder if standards have dropped.
This is intrinsic to the Mixed Fleet project. Lower entry standards and and substantially lower pay and worse conditions. All part of Walsh's cost savings. BA hope that passengers will put up with the deterioration in service. We'll see.