Virgin Atlantic strike announced

Sorry Richard but Frangipan does a 90% good job in all aspects of his post, not to say i disagree with your post either (Mrs D would agree with regards to VS new recruits!!), but the VS management could have done more listening at an early stage & this nasty situation could have been avoided.

put two thirds of frangipan's post together with an equal measure of Richard's and that about sums everything up.

For the sake of those CC's of the same caliber as Denzil's good lady I am afraid a lot of the people on cabincrew.com and prune need to take Sir Rs advice, some of the simplistic banal comments diminish the credibility of the professional crewmembers both strikers and none strikers.

[RichardMannion]

Originally posted by Denzil
Sorry Richard but Frangipan does a 90% good job in all aspects of his post, not to say i disagree with your post either (Mrs D would agree with regards to VS new recruits!!), but the VS management could have done more listening at an early stage & this nasty situation could have been avoided.

More listening, like how? Listening to crew saying they want whacking pay rises because 'BA earn £10k a year more'? That goes in one ear and out the other.

Where I work we have an annual poll for all 65k staff; Guess what the response is to the question of 'Are you satisifed with your compensation package?'. Does it mean we're all going to get inflation smashing pay rises because our ultimate boss is worth $60bn. Not a chance, and anyone with understanding of a P&L will know the simple economics. Doesn't stop us responding that way each year though. When was the last time you heard anyone say they didn't want to earn more money?

It's all about a reality check too; like the member of crew that was a year in to a career at VS complaining to a director that they couldn't afford to buy a house. No sh*t Sherlock, lots of people are in the same boat. Many of those in that boat would have happily taken the pay deals offered, 4.8% for starters, my word they would have ripped arms off.

Management did listen, just a shame that there was a translation layer in the way called the 'Union'.

Richard, yes, I quite agree with you that too many CC are unrealistic and easily led. Like you, I can only conclude from the confused illiteracy that many of them spew forth on the other web-boards that some lack, shall we say, a great capacity for critical thinking. But whose responsibility, exactly, is this dearth of personnel if not of the boardroom chaps to whom you spoke? With whom should the buck stop if not them? Management are paid their juicy salaries precisely to steer an organisation away from the very sort of mess this one now finds itself in. If the brink of a company's first, utterly unnecessary and potentially damaging course of industrial action is not an example of bad management, I don't know what is.

As you have said yourself, you work in a company where, as with most, everyone would like a little more cash than they're getting. The difference is that the management of your company have been intelligent enough in the recruiting decisions they've made and the communication, performance and HR direction they've undertaken that this sentiment has not been allowed to boil over into something more damaging. Virgin management, it seems, have allowed the pot to boil over on their watch.

You have evidence of good management in the statements you have heard from the managers to whom you have talked. I have not had this privilege. All that is left to me to make my judgment is good old fashioned English Empiricism, which leads me to suggest that bad management reveals itself in:

1) Bad recruitment. Many crew members should not have been hired in the first place. The entry screening is obviously allowing in people with unrealistic expectations and incompatible work ethic. There is no excuse for this - each position is very oversubscribed, and so the company can be excruciatingly picky.

2) Bad communication. So many good crew members complain that they no longer feel that they are able effectively to communicate the issues they find on the ground to management. I've read about the increasing distance of management from ops time and again, and I can well believe it. Recurring problems with IFE which are logged but never solved, issues with meal quality and so on are ignored, or just as bad, are SEEN TO BE ignored. Crew feel that there are stultifying layers of uninterested management, and eventually become disillusioned and bitter. Whether the layer of management actually is interested or not is almost irrelevant: that they have allowed themselves to be perceived as divorced and uncaring is failure enough.

3) Bad consistency. Clearly, training and process are often ignored, unadapted and unmonitored. How many times have we had complaints of: no priority boarding; insufficiently heated meals; service lapses; galley gossiping; strange inconsistencies in crew performance. If so many customers can see it and point it out in excruciating detail, why do the same simply-rectified things continue, again and again, without change?

4) Bad monitoring. Similar to 3, a combination of effective oversight, mystery shopping and process tracking would reveal holes in the service, problems and bad apples. It is evident that little oversight takes place by the fact that the same mistakes and misadventures recur ad infinitum.

5) Bad performance management. In a big, unionised workforce, you cannot simply fire those who are incompetent in a flash, but you can get the bad apples out of customer-facing operations as soon as possible, and performance-manage people out of positions for which they are unsuited. Incompetent or indolent crew make life worse for the customers and disillusion their competent and diligent colleagues. But they're just left to fester. Management probably barely realises they exist.

6) Bad brand decisions. A simple example of the IDIOTIC cheapening of the premium brand - whose premium income keeps the company afloat: The Scrooge Pack and its hasty redesign. What clearer example has there been of management's failure to understand the subtleties of brand direction. Anyone on this forum could have warned about what sort of signals are sent off by a tatty cardboard folder and a flimsy plastic pen in your premium cabin. And yet, lo, they came. The pack itself was not a cataclysm, but it was terribly revealing about how little management understood the semantic subtleties of maintaining a premium brand.

I direct a company many orders of magnitude smaller than VA. Nevertheless, I would feel personal shame and accept a sense of personal failure in finding my 'house divided' as it so obviously is with VA. I could whinge about the stupid, nasty, greedy, incompetent staff all I wanted. But then I'd remember who employed them, who trained them and who nurtured them. There were myriad ways this industrial action could have been predicted and prevented in the earliest stages. It was not. That is bad management, however nice and convincing the managers might be when narrating their special pleading.

[RichardMannion]

Frangipan, thank you for a well reasoned and detailed post - and I'm not being sarcastic. The points are well made with evidence.

With that I agree with quite a lot of what has been said. Do VS have issues, yes they damn well do as I've experienced some of them first hand. Is a company of that size always going to get it right 100% of the time, no.

Speaking to VS management, do they know that they have some issues to fix? Yes they do, which is a good step in the right direction. THe bitch is, fixing it as you rightly pointed out it has developed into this situation over a long period of time. It will take time to sort out the ranks of crew, as there are groups within, I see these as:

- The people who want to be crew so they can see the world - short term career and aren't too generally interested in the customer service aspect. 2 years typical span.

- The people that do want to make it a full time career, and want to progress through the levels.

There are some exceptions of course. Your problem arises when people from the first category try and move into the second category. Now I have to agree that the entry bar needs to be sorted out, there is plenty of supply so be more picky. This will take time to have an impact naturally. Then you have the dilemma of identifying where each of the current 4500 crew are; how are they performing, do they need to be managed out, do they need promoting etc. That is the big challenge. I know one solution to the issue, but again that will take time to take effect. There is the big problem of how exactly do you performance monitor crew?

I still think some of this comes down to the lack of performance related pay.

So in summary, yes there are issues. VS Management is very much aware of them, but it takes time to correct them. A number of them are not quick overnight fixes unfortunately.

Thanks,
Richard

The problems aren't new & by the way although many seasoned crew would love a BA size salary they don't expect it & know the limitations that VS have. Item 2 of Frangipans excellent post highlights the feelings of many FSM's. With reference to Item 5, difficult to have faith in a performance monitoring system that would allow 'a partner' to review your performance!!!

We only need to go back a few years to the J2000 mess, nearly all 'front line' staff advised that the product was inferior by design & in it's appeal, did anybody listen?? This attitude by many of the senior management continues & is evident in some of the communication that they send out to staff.

Getting back to the subject in hand. The VS management aren't responsible for all this mess, the union have a lot to answer for, but the management have known for some years that the CC morale is very poor. VS management did talk to the CC about their issues, but initially selected mainly junior crew & the chat consisted of how much damage the CC would do if they pushed things to far. At a later stage senior crew had their feelings heard & feedback would indicate how little they really knew of the problems!

As Richard points out, VS are now aware of the problems & i hope they can be sorted out soon without the brand damage of further strikes.

We only need to go back a few years to the J2000 mess, nearly all 'front line' staff advised that the product was inferior by design & in it's appeal, did anybody listen?? This attitude by many of the senior management continues & is evident in some of the communication that they send out to staff.

Did management listen?

They introduced UCS...

45.

After how long & at what price?? The conversations i'm talking about all took place pre-release of J2000. It was a real mess mechanically, looked like they'd raided the parts bin & this was obvious in it's excellent reliability.

[RichardMannion]

Originally posted by Denzil
After how long & at what price?? The conversations i'm talking about all took place pre-release of J2000. It was a real mess mechanically, looked like they'd raided the parts bin & this was obvious in it's excellent reliability.

Mmm, see I actually think J2000 was a good product. Problem was that it wasn't class leading, and BA had the obvious edge with it's lie flat aspect.

I did many a flight in J2000 and never experienced any mechanical issues. There are still airlines out there now that are only now just on par with what J2000 was. VS took the large investment to try and regain its place as class leader for a J product with UCS. I still think it is a damn good product 5 years on, and having had the experience of trying Club World last week it is very much still up there - one could say that SQ is currently the best but then that is less than 6 months old.

Asking crew for input on a J seat is a tertiary exercise in my book - the people you really need to ask are the ones that are going to be paying for it, the customer. VS did do this, hence the success.

[Darren Wheeler]

Originally posted by RichardMannion

Originally posted by Denzil

Asking crew for input on a J seat is a tertiary exercise in my book - the people you really need to ask are the ones that are going to be paying for it, the customer. VS did do this, hence the success.

Very true. Unless the crew plan on spending the whole flight in one, their thoughts and feedback are a long way down the list and should only relate to how they work around the cabin. OK, once rolled out, they need to feedback any faults they get reported etc. but if a pax isn't happy, they will soon let the company know.

Just spent the morning catching up on the threads on PPrune etc. What a depressing read. I half expect Red Robbo's Big Book of Bolshi Behavior to be on sale. The word 'Schadenfreude' springs to mind in so many posts that you have to wonder what they are doing in the job.

The fact that J2000 had to be replaced so quickly is evidence enough of the failure of management perspicacity in introducing it. Almost as soon as it had been rolled out to the fleet, it needed to be replaced. This represents a drastic failure of research and market extrapolation. It has to be interpreted as a costly mistake, and these costs had knock-on effects - the downgrading of the Freedom Menu, the halting of the v:port rollout and so forth. If the management since that time have changed and have learned from these mistakes, that's all very well, and I hope Richard's talks have revealed that they have. If, on the other hand, they merely said 'yeah, there are problems, but it ain't our fault, gov - it's all the trots and whingers', then I'd worry. Only a big, sincere mea-culpa and the hearty action therefrom will be the proof of the pudding.

Oh, and about v:port - that the system still exhibits stability problems is ridiculous. There are a number of simple fixes (I know a bit about the hardware and software that make up the system) which have, years later, still not been undertaken. That's if you're lucky enough to get it. I remember the early VS statements on how it would 'soon' be rolled across the whole fleet. I am flying to a conference in Orlando later this month, and it is slightly ridiculous that I'll be 'enjoying' Nova in 2008.

[Darren Wheeler]

Originally posted by frangipan
I remember the early VS statements on how it would 'soon' be rolled across the whole fleet. I am flying to a conference in Orlando later this month, and it is slightly ridiculous that I'll be 'enjoying' Nova in 2008.

My understanding is that's because VS took on the Alitalia 744's after the order was cancelled and they were already pre-fitted with Nova. The cost of converting them (post 9/11 etc) was too high.

[RichardMannion]

Originally posted by Darren Wheeler
My understanding is that's because VS took on the Alitalia 744's after the order was cancelled and they were already pre-fitted with Nova. The cost of converting them (post 9/11 etc) was too high.

£3m per plane if I recall.

[Darren Wheeler]

x5 ain't small change, especially in the climate at the time.

Originally posted by RichardMannion

Speaking to VS management, do they know that they have some issues to fix? Yes they do, which is a good step in the right direction.

Richard, sorry to join in on this point but the one thing that let's the Virgin organisation down is the very thing that made them stand out in the first place, service. I have had several experiances with various Virgin companies in the last year including 3 with VS, the last of which involves refund or rather lack of refund for some APD vouchers we were given last year which I'm trying to get sorted out right now without much success.

Frankly their Customer Services dept. stinks. You wait weeks for a response to letters or emails and trying to get someone on the phone who knows what they're talking about is almost impossible.

The on board experiences I have had in the last few years have ranged from superb to poor which should and could be addressed if management had the mind to do so.

It doesn't take much to sort out Customer Services either if you have the commitment and will of management to do so. VS management have displayed neither in the last year or so if my experiences have been anything to go by.

At the end of the day I prefer to fly Virgin because I like the product but this is let down by poor execution and support. If they got this sorted out and got a bit more innovative they would be back where they were a few years ago. As it is I'm seriously thinking of dumping them in favour of BA.

Miopyk[8D]

Originally posted by miopyk

As it is I'm seriously thinking of dumping them in favour of BA.

Miopyk[8D]

As some other famous V-Flyers have done recently [:w]

Seriously though, this thread depresses the hell out of me. Yes service has been inconsistent, yes we can bitch and moan all we want about the workers, but now I get the feeling that VS has got issues from top to bottom and it's all down before any up [:#].

[Nottingham Nick]

Originally posted by miopyk
Frankly their Customer Services dept. stinks.

Whilst this is drawing the strike thread off topic. I think that one sentence sums up a massive percentage of the problems at VS at the moment.

Other than product consistency, it has to be the biggest recurring theme here. Off shore call centres, boiler plate responses that don't address the original point of the letter / email, and just a general 'can't be bothered' attitude.

Contrast that with the excellent service the Premier Team provide (in my experience, at least) and I can see a major problem that is easily fixable.

Surely in a service industry for whom repeat business is an essential factor, your front line Customer Service reps are the ones who will play the second biggest role (after the Cabin Crew) in determining whether a passenger will fly with VS again.

If a passenger writes to, emails or telephones the airline with a complaint, a piece of constructive criticism or a compliment. IMHO they have the right to expect that their points will be addressed. And not be fobbed of with - reply template number 3 and X number of Flying Club points.

Anyway, rant over, back to the speculation about the strike. [:D][8D]

Nick

[mitchja]

If a passenger writes to, emails or telephones the airline with a complaint, a piece of constructive criticism or a compliment. IMHO they have the right to expect that their points will be addressed. And not be fobbed of with - reply template number 3 and X number of Flying Club points.

...and that's of course, if you even get a response at all. Sorry back on topic

Regards

Originally posted by Nottingham Nick

Originally posted by miopyk
Frankly their Customer Services dept. stinks.

Contrast that with the excellent service the Premier Team provide (in my experience, at least) and I can see a major problem that is easily fixable.

If a passenger writes to, emails or telephones the airline with a complaint, a piece of constructive criticism or a compliment. IMHO they have the right to expect that their points will be addressed. And not be fobbed of with - reply template number 3 and X number of Flying Club points.

Nick, I think this actually links into the reasons for the strike in the first place. Undervalued people underperform which when left unchecked spirals out of control. In the end the only way they can feel valued is an increase in pay and/or benefits because by then the goodwill has gone.

While my rant is about Customer Services I think the two things go hand in hand and in my opinion this can only be as result of poor management. Don't get me wrong as a customer I am against the strike and hope if fails. But if I am being treated like s**t as a customer even when spending several thousand pounds a year with them I really do wonder how well VS staff are treated and think perhaps their gripes may be justified.

Miopyk[8D]

[Darren Wheeler]

Well the first strike takes place on Wednesday. No doubt we'll see and hear what the impact, if any, is to pax. I just hope the crew that do strike conduct themselves with a little dignity. Many eyes will be on them.

Agree that UCS is a good product & has to be better if only because you don't get the free smoke effect (one aircraft returned to LHR due to numerous seat box failures, another returned with J class completely blocked off). J2000 was a management mistake, just as next Wednesday will be. If they want to win they should be moving to get around the table & get some facts, all they are currently doing is to disillusion more CC.

I find it confusing the amount of 'the management should' do this and that comments, this I work for you and you pay me so you should do as I say mantra is alien to me...sorry.

My confidence in VA has been seriously knocked, not by;

Broken UCS seats
Crap food
Lack of choice of bad food
Non existant freedom menu
Dirty cabin
crap amenity kit
not even bothering to load the crap amenity kit

Bismal customer service on the ground when things go wrong.

This should be enough to have people running to BA or deciding to look for the cheapest option rather than pay more and 'hope' for what you thought you would get.

Whats had me seriously thinking of cashing my miles in after shelling out £50K over the last 9 years to VA is the conversations I have read on Prune/Cabin crew and some on here between cabin crew and what they really think about each other their collegues on the ground and passengers. I certainly won't be wearing rose tinted glasses when I board a VA plane in future.

A minority ofcrew with very loud voices are and have seriously damaged the respect and admiration a lot of pax had for the crew, so much that they would in the past have overlooked other shortfalls, not anymore me thinks.

Originally posted by easygoingeezer

My confidence in VA has been seriously knocked, not by;

Broken UCS seats
Crap food
Lack of choice of bad food
Non existant freedom menu
Dirty cabin
crap amenity kit
not even bothering to load the crap amenity kit

Bismal customer service on the ground when things go wrong.

Egg - you hit it on the head, all these faults are down to VS management, not the crew. Don't knock all of the crew, just keep perspective that the bad apples are probably less than 0.1% of the whole - whereas management bear a collective failing for the current state of VS. Leaders are after all leaders, they get paid to take responsibility and do things right, and to take blame when it goes wrong.

Originally posted by slinky09

Originally posted by easygoingeezer

My confidence in VA has been seriously knocked, not by;

Broken UCS seats
Crap food
Lack of choice of bad food
Non existant freedom menu
Dirty cabin
crap amenity kit
not even bothering to load the crap amenity kit

Bismal customer service on the ground when things go wrong.

Egg - you hit it on the head, all these faults are down to VS management, not the crew. Don't knock all of the crew, just keep perspective that the bad apples are probably less than 0.1% of the whole - whereas management bear a collective failing for the current state of VS. Leaders are after all leaders, they get paid to take responsibility and do things right, and to take blame when it goes wrong.

True, but my post was intended to be read in its entirity, one expects corporate management to cut costs and optimise turnover, the issue now is with whats been written on forums by the crew can a passenger look a crew member in the eyes in the same way as before and can we see ourselves as equals.

I still have the utmost confidence in some crew that I can remember and hope to cross paths with on future flights. Flying back from Joburg on Sunday 30th, the FA that seemed to be in charge (there was no FSM that I could see) was possibly one of the best crew I've ever encountered - efficient, friendly, not the usual textbook responses to problems. And there were problems with the flight/UCS, yet the crew put them into shadow and the flight sticks in my mind as a very good one.

Customer service in my opinion outweighs all other factors so its no use pinning the blame on management.

Surely cabin crew did not join VS to follow and remain loyal to management, they, one would hope, joined the airline because they enjoy the customer service aspect. Therefore, it's no use arguing that it's management's crap brand/product decisions that allow crew to perform to less than their best.

45.