Poor old British Airways. It was bad enough that backup systems failed after a power surge brought down its IT systems on Saturday morning. But when hundreds of passengers were then left stranded, crisis-response experts accused the airline of failing them, too. Four days later, half a billion pounds have been wiped off the value of BA parent company IAG.
Paul Charles, a former director of communications for Eurostar and Virgin Atlantic, where he created the airline’s crisis strategy, is baffled by how long it took BA to say anything. “You have to respond within an hour with a full statement on what is going on,” he says. “It took seven hours for the CEO to record a video Twitter message. You could fly to New York in that time, it’s ridiculous.”
In a second video, shared yesterday afternoon, Nicola Pearson, a former BBC News reporter who now runs BA’s news operation, interviews her boss, the airline’s chief executive Álex Cruz. He says he is “profusely sorry” for the disruption and attempts to reassure customers that it couldn’t happen again. Charles, who now runs the PC Agency, a London travel consultancy, thinks BA’s brand is strong enough to survive, “but it is being eroded”, he adds. “When airlines don’t have good crisis plans in place it can lead to the decline of the brand.” United Airlines’ stock price took a dive when it managed to blame a passenger who had been dragged off an overbooked plane in Chicago. The airline later admitted that it had “messed up” its initial response and the share price has since recovered. Malaysia Airlines had to be nationalised to keep it flying after the loss of two planes in as many months in 2014.
Even relatively minor crises tend to get amplified. “There’s something about airlines and airports that fascinates the public and the media, and means these stories are often given greater prominence than perhaps a crisis in another sector,” Charles adds. Good crisis plans include command structures and a checklist of “key stakeholders” who the CEO calls directly, such as top corporate clients and travel agents. The biggest crisis Charles has managed? A single complaint about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to London. In an email to Richard Branson that went viral in 2009, the anonymous passenger included photos of his meal alongside a humorous review. The mashed potato appeared to have been “passed through the digestive tract of a bird,” he wrote. “This very quickly became a global negative story and a very early lesson in social media,” Charles recalls. “We quickly responded and turned it around by offering the passenger a role as a food tester for future menus.”
