#totango

British Airways is in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. Dennis Howlett digs in a little, over on Diginomica.

Like Dennis, I can probably describe BA as "my current favourite airline" and, like Dennis, I do get pretty good service from them as well as reasonably regular upgrades and other perks. I'll be with them once more on Saturday, heading over to San Francisco from London for this year's CloudBeat.

Their planes span the spectrum from disgracefully shabby to pretty swish, with most perhaps best described as a bit worn.

But, regardless of the state of the plane or the class of travel, my best and worst experiences with the airline all come down to its people.

BA, like other airlines, is investing in new planes and new interiors for older planes. BA, perhaps more visibly than others, is investing in procedures and systems to track their regular fliers, their behaviour, their spending patterns, and their preferences. The in-flight iPads Den mentions are simply the front end to a rich and complex network of indicators, but they give individuals in the air a lot of power when it comes to meeting their customers' needs.

And yet, with all the same resources at their disposal, some cabin service teams are an absolute joy to travel with and others can ruin the smoothest flight in the flattest bed on the swankiest plane in the fleet. And, bizarrely, it almost always does seem to be entire teams; although individuals stand out (for good or ill!), the crew on the plane is pretty uniformly either excellent, good, indifferent, poor, or disgracefully awful. Is it something they drink?

The Galleries Lounge manager at SFO, who makes a point of talking to his guests every time I've seen him on duty. The cabin service director on a flight from London to New York in July, who made my (less travelled) wife and daughter feel like the only passengers on the plane. The countless cabin crew who take a second to smile, or to say something more than "chicken or beef." They're the real asset of an airline like BA. And then there's the woman on the entrance to the Lounge in Heathrow, who nearly got that same July trip off to a bad start. Or the entire upstairs team on a recent overnight flight from SFO to London, who can't have engaged with their passengers as people even once in ten hours. They're the ones that all the systems and trackers and processes in the world can't help become valuable brand ambassadors for their airline.