British Airways (BA) could face fines of around £8m in compensation pay-outs due to cancelled flights across Heathrow, Gatwick and London City airports in August.
This all comes as BA celebrates 100 years since it started flying, with a star-studded advert designed to be ‘a love letter to Britain’ and a retro paint-job for four of its planes. Passengers that have been affected by its latest faults will instead be reminded of a past where the company resonated better with its passengers, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
Laura Beaton, Travel & Tourism Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “BA’s issues arise due to a lack of communication. Multiple stranded passengers experienced a lack of meaningful information about the delays and cancelations, and the situation was not handled as well as it could have been.”
In a GlobalData survey, 89% of UK respondents stated that how familiar/trustworthy a product feels has an influence on their product choice. This means that BA is in a good place to recoup passenger trust if the company can change its approach to be more customer focused.
Recently, passengers on British Airways flight, BA422 traveling from London to Valencia had to exit the plane by emergency escape chutes and wait three hours to access their luggage, causing massive inconvenience for the passengers.
Beaton continues: “A middling reputation has been part of the downfall for many airline failures in recent years, including Monarch and Air Berlin. In 2006, BA was voted the world’s best airline, proving that the company’s reputation had a lot of recognition, but its decline in customer service has not gone unnoticed.”
British Airways is rated one out of five stars on Trust Pilot’s website, and 5/10 on Skytrax. Its decision to remove free food from all of its short-haul flights in January 2017 was seen as taking a step closer to operating as a low-cost carrier (LCC).
