It’s fair to say the opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow has been an absolute and unmitigated disaster. Flights have left without luggage, others have been cancelled, passengers have been stranded for hours on end, and one 25-year-old woman had to stuff her wedding dress into hand luggage to get it on the place because they couldn’t get her other baggage on the plane (oh yeah, she had to pay a taxi driver to take the baggage BA couldn’t check back to her flat).
But what did BA chief executive Willie Walsh have to say about it all? Did he try to play it down? Did he try to shift the blame? None of the above:
"British Airways has not delivered and we need to deliver [and] I am accepting responsibility, the buck stops with me."
Perhaps every single one of the certain Labour ministers could take a leaf out of Willie’s book and start taking responsibilities when things in their department don’t go quite right <cough>HMRC</cough>…
Posted by Devlar on March 30th, 2008 at 7:09 am:
They lost my luggage (well one of the bags) last week at Heathrow when I flew in, mind you they did pay to have it delivered to my home after they found it.
Yet, you know as well as I that personal responsibility when it comes to losing customers is great in the market, not so much in a monopoly. You only have once every 4 years or so to pick a new government, can’t do it right away. So governments simply hope you forget about it all