Its fascinating to see how the curse of Terminal Five continues to have repercussions for those involved. I'm not loyal to any airline however, I did think that British Airways got more than their fair share of the media flack. Ok, they hyped it beyond all proportions and then when it all fell apart they let the passengers tell the story while simultaneously refusing every interview put their way. But the fact still remained that the building was BAA property and they clearly had some responsibility for what had gone on. Yet, it was the BA brand that was run through the mud and BAA got away with telling all and sundry that the failures were the airline's fault, not theirs.
This all seemed a bit of coup from a PR point of view, with perhaps the slight exception of tarnishing the brand of your biggest customer, but judging the stories over the last few days it looks as though the seemingly well executed BAA crisis management plan was instead more along the lines of "La, la, la, we can't hear you, la, la," with extra special crossed fingers the story didn't re-emerge.
So now, they have a second, far more worrying crisis to deal with, not just one that threatens their very existence but has had the impact of making consumers are aware of their market dominance and how it affects them in charges etc. Worse still, the fact they were so quick to drop their customers in the sh*t when the first crisis broke means they are unlikely to get much support from the combined ranks of the airlines if they decide to challenge the Competition Commission ruling.
It will be interesting to see how it develops but this is a classic case of "what goes around, comes around..."..incredible really that no-one on their crisis planning committee saw it.
