Mobile World Congress is a trade show. As trade shows go, it’s a pretty big deal. 85,000 people come to Barcelona, wide eyed and giddy to get a whiff of the zeitgeist, and the 4G ether crackles with updates on all the gossip, rivalry, power politics and ruthless dealmaking. I’m not talking about the gadgets, of course, but Season 3 of ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix which opened just before the CIOs-in-waiting left their pods and campuses and headed east.
Now all routes to the city and its Gran Fira exhibition centre are packed with air warriors. These elite travellers are able to condense their wardrobe requirements tighter than a neutron star, while still having space in a separate carry on for a mobile command centre that would have made NASA proud, back in the day when having the right stuff meant something other than the latest version of Android.
You’d have thought, therefore, that airlines would be ready for this sudden rise in the number of seasoned high milers and take some precautions to ensure that they and their less experienced fellow travellers, bearers of Easter eggs, hen party hats and bus passes, happily co-exist on their flights to and from Spain.
Well, you might have thought that, but clearly no one told British Airways that there would be a few more nodes in the grid than usual this week. So when our 16.05 British Airways flight to Barcelona started boarding, it inevitably became more logjammed than the mobile phone bandwidth at a large event like, er, Mobile World Congress. The overhead lockers were quickly filled with all those densely packed mobile wardrobes, mobile trouser presses, mobile Nespresso machines, mobile solar panels and anything else that the mobile visionaries require to keep their GPS permanently aligned with ‘Where It’s At’ for an entire week.
As frustrations rose, I could see lots of scowling faces deeply focused on their tiny screens – and not so tiny screens. Have you seen the size of the Google Nexus 6? Five years from now, if it gets any bigger, you’ll be able to avoid situations like this entirely by fitting the Nexus 6 with boosters and a cabin and using it as a drone.
I wondered if my fellow passengers were in search of an app that could reduce the size of their luggage, or their neighbour, to something big enough to fit in a seat back pocket. Perhaps they were just tweeting at the crapness of it all, that in an age of always on, instantaneous, big data, BA seemed incapable of consulting the Gregorian Calendar, a means of real time planning and scenario modelling that was quite popular back in the Middle Ages.
I know I’m being slightly unfair, but really BA, even Ryanair at its most notorious does this better than you. All it would have taken were some temporary gate controls on larger carry on items and we might have been able to leave without the disorderly retreat. And it is somewhat ironic that this fiasco should occur on the day Executive Club customers were told they will no longer be able to make free seat selections on hand luggage fares. In future, it’s ‘get what you’re given’ or shell out, a move that will further raise temperatures of those who not only will be unable to put their bags in an overhead locker, but will have paid for the privilege of not being able to do so.
Normally when you take over an airline, you imbue your acquisition with your corporate culture and absorb it into the fold. But in the case of BA, at least on the short haul routes, the parent airline is having an identity crisis and seems to be transforming into Vueling. First there was the misguided refurbishment that bestowed upon Club Europe seats all the comfort and spaciousness of a Presbyterian church pew. The expression ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’, has never seemed more true.
Then there were the drastic reductions in Tier and Avios points for economy travellers, allegedly to free up more ‘reward flights’ in the schedules. I can see why this would seem like a good idea in the focus groups, but facilitating more reward spaces by making people fly much further to get them, feels counter intuitive. There may be more redemption seats moving forward but that’s of little comfort if it takes four times as long to qualify. Better start planning the holidays for 2018 before the rush starts.
And now we have today’s email regarding hand luggage restrictions, which affects everyone, even these hardcore fliers who could calculate waiting times in Security with the exactitude of an atomic clock. This imperfect circle of customer service is completed by the fact that BA profits rose this week to their highest levels in years. Today’s experience seems to offer a microcosm of how those gains have been achieved.
And for some reason the cabin crew, normally the one thing you can rely upon with British Airways, seemed strangely uninterested in making their presence felt. Maybe their batteries were running out of charge like the phones and tablets. I could see a few faces frowning as people realised that the 30% of battery they’d calculated to get them through the flight would not encompass the additional delay. But beyond a few sporadic announcements asking for bags without a home to be brought to the front of the plane, the crew pretty much left the passengers to sort it out themselves. And as we know, late in the day, on a warmish afternoon, with travellers of all backgrounds, shapes and sizes trying to pack into a plane several sizes too small, the end result will be more flash mob than crowd sourcing.
Tensions began to rise as bags were moved an inch either way from their place in the overhead locker. People found all kinds of reasons why being separated from their luggage for a two hour flight would potentially bring down the Euro or some other catastrophe. And those who could not find anywhere to place their carry on items had to battle back down the aisle, a task more difficult than the one faced by Blackberry in trying to remain a going concern. I swear I heard someone say ‘Mind my Easter eggs’ and it took me a moment to realise that she was talking about edible chocolates and not some hidden treasure in some new smartphone game (in app purchase required).
And I’m left to wonder if what we are now seeing is the ‘in-app purchasifying’ of the entire customer experience as it applies to flying. BA has been heavily advertising it’s slogan ‘To fly, to serve’ recently, but to me, it just feels like ‘To fly, to save’. From hotels to travel, event-going to banking, grocery shopping to health care, there will be a basic level of service that’s just about tolerable if you really have no choice, or means, but superior service or features will increasingly be the preserve of those willing to pay the price. And the price will be just low enough to seem reasonable but the profits far higher than the traditional levels of service that once came as standard.
Visitors to Mobile World may well see the future this week but I saw a different future today and I don’t much care for it. And British Airways shouldn’t be too complacent in counting those new profits and identifying more shavings, I mean savings, in customer services. Birds are not the only things that fly and get angry. Treat your customers like piggies, or cattle, and glass houses will not be the only thing that break when the angry birds take flight on other airlines.