The IT systems failure which grounded all British Airways short-haul flights at Heathrow last Saturday morning came as the carrier migrates its IT infrastructure to the cloud.
BA blamed “technical issues” for the problems at the weekend which affected check-in and other systems. continued into Sunday
The carrier’s chief commercial officer, Colm Lacey, told members and partners of the Business Travel Association meeting in London: “We had an IT outage. The team are digging into it to find out what happened and will put a plan together.”
Lacey suggested he wanted a new partnership with the BTA, saying: “From me you can have a commitment to TMCs [travel management companies]. We have to be open. We have to be transparent.
“There has been some language in the past that made it feel less like a partnership – from your end and certainly from our end. It’s key we rebuild our relationship with the trade.”
Travel Weekly understands some of the IT problems at BA remain unresolved. Lacey acknowledged: “It takes time to bring systems back up. It’s challenging for our customers and challenging for our people. We’re continuing to work through it.”
But he explained: “We’re in the middle of a process of moving our IT infrastructure to the cloud.”
Lacey told the BTA: “We know we need to do better. I apologise to those travelling in the last 10 days.”
The IT outage followed severe disruption of services due to the storms on February 18 and 21 and problems with BA’s baggage handling at Heathrow.
Lacey also acknowledged problems with BA’s call centres, saying: “The queue wait times are unacceptable.
“We are continually increasing resources. We are investing. We’re half-way through replacing the call system in our call centres.”
He insisted: “We need to invest and be better. We talk about being a premium proposition and we need to invest in that.”
BA suspended flights to Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week and the closure of Russian airspace.
The carrier has also suspended services to Hong Kong and Tokyo Haneda until May because of the airspace closure while other services require “some re-routing around the airspace”, said Lacey.