BA investors as much as customers deserve explanation for IT woes
Guess the year in which a City analyst wrote this introduction to a research note on British Airways’ parent company, IAG: “BA suffered yet another operational failure yesterday, this time larger than the spate of rumbling issues over the last year. As yet the cause is not known.”
Congratulations if you answered 2017, the year of Bthe airline’s mega IT meltdown. RBC Capital Markets’ analysts judged it “increasingly questionable” to view the affair as a one-off, and they have been proved correct in spades. Subsequent failures have been smaller but the “rumbling issues” of half a decade ago are still rumbling.
On Wednesday this week, BA cancelled 50 flights at Heathrow because of a “network connectivity issue”, and the same number on Thursday as it managed the knock-on effects. On the last weekend in February, the figure was 252 when a different “technical” problem was blamed. In total, there have been three IT failures in six weeks. While the percentage of affected passengers in that period is calculated to be only 2.5%, the figure won’t feel small to those affected. BA is lucky that P&O Ferries has a monopoly on “travel chaos” stories.
Every incident brings forth gushing apologies from BA but never a prediction of when its systems will be robust – or sufficiently resilient to withstand all but extraordinary events. You won’t find anything of that description in IAG’s annual report for 2021. The IT highlighted in BA chief executive Sean Doyle’s two-page summary of how the airline is “building a brighter future” is a new app that allows passengers to order food and drink to their table in the lounges. Punters would surely prefer greater confidence that their plane will take off.
Even luddites understand that upgrading multiple
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