Travel Weekly Blog

Interesting analysis in today's Media Guardian of how BA handled the T5 launch. Included are comments by the likes of PR guru Max Clifford, but the most telling comment comes from Julia Simpson, BA's head of corporate communications.

She admits that not allowing journalists to ask questions of BA's operations director Gareth Kirkwood was a mistake - and she is not wrong. Here is what she had to say:

Yes, the opening day of Terminal 5 was a nightmare. It had all started so well. The world's media had welcomed in the first flight at 4.50am, captained by a woman. But by mid-afternoon the baggage system collapsed and serious disruption loomed. Media desire for answers was outstripping our ability to supply them.

Journalists wanted to know what had happened to the baggage system. The blunt truth was at that stage we did not know. If we had, we would have fixed it.

With events moving so fast, we put up our operations director to make a statement on the situation but not take questions. Our overriding objective was to say sorry. But hands up. We should have taken questions.

The next morning, [the chief executive] Willie Walsh fronted up and took it on the chin. In January my PR team had won widespread plaudits for the handling of the BA38 crash-landing incident at Heathrow.

The lesson? If a customer-facing operation disintegrates in front of the massed media there is no PR guru in the world who can save your bacon.

Martin Couzins, online editor