Is London City to JFK really a good idea?

As BA “consolidates” further (otherwise known as retreating into the Heathrow bunker) it’s worth considering how the airline will actually market its much-vaunted London City to JFK service.

To counter the retro “one-stop” service which the length of London City runway and the width of the Atlantic obliges the service to be, BA proposes to have passengers not only stop but deplane and clear US Customs and Immigration at Shannon. This will either be a smugglers’ paradise or a variable delay mechanism to further depreciate the service for the time-conscious business traveller.

According to the various flying blogs, BA has dictated that the landing back at London City can only be made by senior pilots. Great. So what they’re offering is a landing that’s so fraught they’ll only allow their most experienced pilots to fly it - and then insist they do it after a peak-time departure from JFK and at the end of an eight-hour transatlantic flight.

And all this to avoid an hour in a cab - which the business traveller will still have to do at the other end anyway!

The whole thing sounds to me like a marketing plan drawn up by a junior co-pilot wanting to get ahead.

Is it worth the gamble?

I have the curious distinction of being a former BA employee and also someone who, in later employment, was asked to take a pay cut “to save the company”.

Based on my experience I recommend that before agreeing to work for a month without pay, BA employees find out what happens to Mr Walsh if his stratagem fails and the company goes under. Compare the situation he’ll be in with the one that they’ll be in and then decide if they want to gamble a month’s pay.

I didn’t take the pay cut my boss asked for; the company went down and I had a difficult 9 months keeping up with my bills. My former boss retired to the south of France with his secretary and a very comfortable pension.

Buddy, have you got dime?

As previously reported when Mr Walsh warned that BA was in a fight for survival, he felt it necessary to add that this time he really meant what he said. I believe that’s because the intended audience wasn’t the staff at all but the government which he wants to let him create an anti-passenger cartel with American Airlines.

It’s always wise to look behind the immediate message when Mr Walsh issues a press release. Remember the fanfare with which the CEO announced that he was foregoing his salary in July? Today it’s announced he’s not going to draw his bonus this year as well - that’ll be three years in a row.

But hold on. Three years ago he didn’t take a bonus because he’d also accepted full responsibility for the Terminal 5 fiasco which was reputed to have claimed the company £32 million. Last year the results were so bad he didn’t qualify for his bonus, so why make a fuss about this being the third year in a row?

In any case, what he didn’t tell you until the Annual Report came out was that he got a 6% pay increase last year which took his monthly salary cheque to a belt-tightening £61,916!

The really good news for Mr Walsh is that if he meets the targets (set by one W. Walsh, of course) in three years time he’ll qualify for a long term shares scheme which will pay him £1.1million in 2012.

So in that context giving up £61,000 in July (which will be worth something like £37,800 in his pocket) seems quite modest.

Hopefully he didn’t read this morning’s newspaper which reported that he and his cabin staff earn twice as much as their counterparts at Virgin - but maybe you can’t believe everything you read in the papers.

Pensioners, recently denied the Staff Travel perk they thought they’d earned by accepting modest salaries over the years, might ask whether an annual salary of £743,000.00 isn’t more than enough for a Chief Executive who says he can’t do anything to influence his most important market, the business traveller? Should we not be paying someone who can?

Mr Walsh talks to the government

Why does Mr Walsh need to mention that his warnings about the end of BA etc are not just posturing or scaremongering? That sounds like the boy who’s cried wolf before and who’s not taken seriously any more.

Twice now he’s been denied his merger with AA - a merger that would serve nobody but BA and AA and do immeasurable harm to the true interests of passengers.

Could his message of impending doom really be aimed at the governments to whom he’s pleading once again to be allowed to form a cosy cartel which would control up to 65% of the traffic between a host of UK and American cities?

BA’s commercial management is a shambles. As I’ve noted before, Gatwick-New York is axed after 12 months; London-Jeddah re-introduced after a gap of four years. This sort of panic marketing wouldn’t work on a car boot stall and has no place in a modern airline.

Right now Air France/KLM sales teams are blitzing - doubling up tactical sales teams to ensure their regular clients choose their services whenever they can. At the same time BA is cutting, routes, staff, service - because that’s all it can do.

At this moment the smartest thing BA could do would be to hand the entire Heathrow operation over to a handling agency as they’ve done at almost every other airport in the world, and spend the money they’ll save hiring a sales team. Herding people needs no special skill, salesmen are a breed.

Waste of space

As we all know there lies, damn lies and statistics.

And instead of getting on with encouraging its staff to do more, better and costing less to help it out of its current predicament of flying fewer people to fewer places less often, the airline has devoted a large chunk of one page of its staff rag, BA News, to explaining why Virgin’s £64m profit is almost exactly the same as BA’s £401m loss.

Anyone who’s dealt with accountants knows how figures can be presented to reflect different faces, and for sure BA’s accounts wallahs wore out many quill pens making the £401m loss seem as little as possible - that’s what they’re paid for.

It isn’t the profit or loss that seems to matter - it’s the mindset in BA that bothers to spend time and money examining how Sir Richard managed to post a £64m profit when all they could rise to was a whacking loss. The message they convey says, "it’s OK we’re not doing as badly as it looks" - which is hardly an incentive to work harder for less.

To be fair elsewhere the CEO repeats how bad the trading environment is - but says little about how he plans to tackle it other than by paying fewer people less money. Taken to its extreme this could be the complete salvation, mothball all the aircraft, fire the staff and reduce the company’s outgoings to nil. That’s taken care of the loss then.

I repeat again, if Mr Walsh can’t get the airline into profit, then he should make way for someone who can.

Elsewhere in the paper, space is given to a self-congratulatory blub from Albion Idrizi, Commercial Manager, Kosovo and Albania who brags that he recently managed to give away two free tickets organised by the British Embassy in Albania. The letter from the ambassador "hopes that the publicity justified the donation".

Apart from the consummate sales skill Mr Idrizi shows in managing to give away two tickets (no doubt there was stiff competition from at least half of the IATA airlines in Albania) the story shows how criteria have lapsed. In BA, up to 1979 at least, we had to prove beforehand the publicity we would gain from any "trade exchange". I know because that was one of my department’s jobs. Now they only have to "hope".

Finally a footnote to reassure pensioners who are used to getting the bum’s rush from Hilary Brayfield or Clare Hatchwell (before she was elevated from Staff Travel) that rudeness is alive and well in BA.

In the latest BA News a staff member writes to complain that because BA is selling last-minute upgrades into Business class at the airport, she found she was stuck in Peasant Class despite having paid the premium standby fare which cost her three times the normal rate.

She points out quite reasonably that unless the reservations system shows that Business Class is practically empty, it’s not worth staff bothering to fork out the rip-off standby fare.

The reply from Janine Sparks, Rewards Consultant basically says "no-one forced you pay the higher rate, it’s your own fault." With that attitude perhaps Ms Sparks should be a candidate for Staff Travel Manager.