Travelblather

Continuing thoughts on the luggage chaos at Heathrow's new terminal 5 building. Bangkok's new airport suffered similar embarrassment when it opened. 6,700 pieces of baggage got lost following a computerised sorting failure. Wonder if the same firm (Kawasaki) developed the system at T5?

It's been years in the making and cost 4.4 billion to build, but the new Terminal 5 building at Heathrow has still opened in total disarray. One in five flights have been cancelled due to baggage getting lost. Passengers have ended up sleeping on the gleaming new floors. Rumours abound that some staff couldn't even get into the staff car park.

There will doubtless be plenty of finger pointing and heads will roll - quite probably at both British Airways and BAA  the airport operator... I'm amazed that a company like BA with decades of experience in customer service can have ended up in such an awful mess. It's about as bad a PR disaster as you could imagine. A couple of thoughts:
1) BA road tested the terminal extensively - at least that's what we were told. Some 25,000 volunteers were asked to help trail the services and technology.
2) BAA has been regularly critised for under investment and poor airport management.

Taking these two facts into account, I wouldn't be at all surprised if most of the blame sticks with BAA. The sooner its near monopoly on London airports is broken up the better. Heathrow in particular is a hellish place and no amount of new terminals will make much difference. As a regular flyer I do anything I can to avoid it....

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For a long time now publishers have been bemoaning the decreasing sales of their guidebooks as travellers turn increasingly to user generated content on-line. Lonely Planet (which was recently bought by the BBC) has introduced a new Pick and Mix concept that allows you to download just the chapters of a particular guidebook that you are interested in. A chapter costs £2.50 Wonder if it will catch on? For me the great thing about a guidebook is it's tangible... something to leaf through ona train, in the loo, wherever. But it's a creative idea... and I doubt it will do much damage to sales of the physical guidebooks either - unless Amazon starts selling the PDFs too... that would create havoc! They're pushing the concept too - it's promoted with a banner on their home page.

I've been trying hard to avoid posts about dumb PR companies but I give up. It seems hard to imagine an age when journalists just did their job - researching stories and writing them. (And being paid enough of a decent wage to be able to commit decent time to proper research.) Now we are buried daily under a torrent of non-news from sub-contracted sales people calling themselves media professionals whose only aim is to shout louder than the next PR person and get their product mentioned. It probably worked at first... journalists are partly to blame... we tend to have short attention spans and if someone gives us a good story we're only to happy to run it. These days though every second company employs some Fiona or Patricia to pump press releases out into the inboxes of all and sundry. Nothing to say? No problem! We'll just make something up! The latest is from the PR for the Cotswold Outdoor Company. It's titled 'Product of the Week'. Yes, every week they're going to send me information about a product for no reason other than that they've designated it product of the week. This week it's (wait for it) Garden Clocks! For heaven's sake! Who the hell is going to write about bleeding garden clocks? WHY?

Ahh. There's nothing like being given the run around by an airline. Us travelhacks depend on them to get us to places so we can write features. They quite like the fact that we give them mentions at the end of a feature. So much so that (gasp) if the destination is one they want to publicise they give you a free seat. Well that's the theory... So I have a confirmed feature for a major UK national newspaper's weekend magazine about Mexico. I've been talking to the BGB the PR company that works for Thomsonfly a newish airline brand launched as a spin-off business from the huge tour operator Thomson, part of the TUI empire They have direct flights to Cancun from London Gatwick. Perfect. Well that's what I figured...

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