Adrie Reinders

I had the pleasure of travelling again this past Saturday – travel is becoming an increasing stress factor in a business man’s life! First I flew from Chicago to New York with Jet blue. A few years ago when I first flew with Jet Blue, it was a new and refreshing experience, now it seems to have become just another low-cost airline. Nothing special but cheap.

Once in New York, I had to get from the Jet Blue terminal, Terminal 5, to Terminal 2 – where Delta would depart for Amsterdam. This was my first experience with the Air Train at JFK – just unbelievable! It has been heralded as a new way of connecting the terminals, and was only launched after many years of delays. The genius who designed this connection was either drunk when he did so, or hadn’t finished his schooling. From the luggage belt at terminal 5, you first have to walk at least 20 minutes to get to the nearest train stop – not much fun with two serious pieces of luggage. The trainstop is not right there in the terminal, like everywhere else in the world but way outside of it. Then you get to Terminal 2, and have to repeat the entire procedure including a walk outside across all sorts of lanes of traffic – great when it is raining cats and dogs! And all this because they seem to have skimped on the number of stops on the line and thus feel they need to drop passengers right BETWEEN terminal 2 and 3, and then have them walk the rest… clever stuff.

These days everything about air travel is grey, disinterested personnel on the ground, not much difference in the cabin, smaller aircraft then usual and a noticeably lower number of passenger. Service on board of our flight was fine – but again – the fun seems to have gone out of travelling. It was almost good to be back at Schiphol, at least an airport that’s bright and modern!!

British Airways and Terminal 5 – a marriage made in Hell….

This past Sunday I flew with BA from Chicago to London en route to Amsterdam. The journey to London was uneventful and comfortable, with good service on board but the arrival was rather a rude awakening from that otherwise perfect traveller’s dream. When I arrived at Heathrow, they’d had snow overnight – all of 6 inches which compared to Chicago where I had just come from was an absolutely laughable amount.  Not so at Heathrow – panic struck all round apparently, the runways had not been swept, gates were all occupied as planes were not taking off and all in all chaos rapidly descended over our innocent heads – and all at 6am in the morning. It took about 3 hours of us standing somewhere out on Heathrow’s tarmac before anything developed. Someone we’ll call Bright Spark for now had apparently arrived at the office and was taking charge. He decided that the plane we were on could now be brought in closer to the gates, and that we could all be offloaded and transported by bus to Terminal 5. For those of you who read my blog on T5 of two weeks ago, you will understand my below zero enthusiasm for this plan – as T5 had not even proven to be capable of handling connections under normal conditions, let alone when thousands of people descended on the terminal unable to go anywhere since their connecting flights had all been cancelled. But Bright Spark clearly thought that it would be better today, despite this situation. Terminal 5 seems to believe it is a virtual company, where you really don’t need people to run it, and that as long as you copy the logistics from Terminal 1, which was developed over 50 years ago – it should be fine even though now you are close to transporting 60 million passengers. Thus we were all led to our proverbial slaughter and offloaded – only to be put in a vague type of queue which for the next four hours seemed to do nothing, go nowhere and where it was totally unclear what you were actually doing there. Nobody during that time offered any drinks to the waiting passengers, no food, nor – worst of all – any communication. English, I am told, is the world’s premier language and could therefore have been quite successfully applied in communication – however, BA still seems to believe its passengers are clairvoyant and above a few words now and then. In the end, rather then continuing to queue not knowing what I was waiting for – I decided to book myself a new flight out the next day online – getting my laptop out of my handluggage whilst in line. It was obvious no planes were leaving the airport that day, and I could have stood there till the next day but since I like my creature comforts I booked myself, also online, into a nice hotel in London. It took another hour to get to London by train, since those were also cancelled to a large degree, but from arrival in the hotel life started to look a wee bit better since I was at least able to get something to eat and drink after 10 hours of waiting around without anything at all.
The thing about BA that amazed me the most was that there seemed to be enough personnel around – they were standing in groups of 5 or 6 close to where all of these frustrated passengers had been queuing for hours and hours, laughing and chatting. When we asked them why they weren’t doing anything to help us all get out of there – their simple reply was that they were not the right personnel to rebook our flights or help us get a hotel for the night… two questions Mr. Bright Spark – why the hell were they standing there then simply annoying all of us with their careless banter and lack of concern or care, could they not have been instructed to do something useful like help the process along, get us food or drinks and generally show concern for the situation? And two – if you have so much personnel that cannot be used in a crisis like this – why has it never occurred to anyone that you might train them for dual roles instead of clearly only teaching them one skill, which one skill furthermore was obviously nothing to do with customer service.

One last comment – the computer system kept going down, the telephone system was overloaded (I tried several times to get through to customer service by phone) and again – no backup seemed to be available at all to cope with the extreme load. How difficult can it be to invest in these technologies and take care that it runs under ALL circumstances?

To continue my story – I returned to the airport yesterday morning to get on my flight to Amsterdam…finally. On arrival it was a sea of people in the terminal building – thousands of people queueing once more, just to get checked in and get to their final destinations. This time – no BA personnel in sight, no signs anywhere making sense of the mass of bodies and direct them in an efficient manner. Luckily I had printed my boarding pass at the hotel before leaving, and since BA had conveniently lost my luggage the day before, I could head straight through to security. I sat in the overcrowded lounge from 10 am to 14:30 with no information on the flight which was meant to leave at 13:40. Not even sure it would eventually depart or not. However, finally around 4pm suddenly the board sprung to life with the announcement that there was a plane, at a gate, and a crew had been found… so off we went.

Now the final piece of the puzzle is my suitcase which was lost in the mayhem. Hopefully BA’s tracking system is more modern then the rest of their technology and the system can cope with the increased demand…. I’ll keep my fingers crossed until I get it back in my possession…probably just in time for my next trip!

Comfort: 0
Communication: 0
Care and Attention: 0
Professionality: 1
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