Death Wish?

The second planned strike by Unite has gone ahead and BA reckon that 75% of their scheduled flights will go ahead.

The two statements within that one sentence should be the most terrible things a world class airline could possibly imagine but for Willie Walsh, the CEO of what was once 'The World's Favourite Airline', it seems to be music. He has been described recently as being 'macho' in the face of an unreasonable Union but the reality is that the fight with Unite over changes to Cabin Staff contracts is only one area of failure amidst a whole plethora for the CEO. In fact, about a year before the recession, he was voted one of the Executives of the Decade, right now he is about the biggest chump. Having lost the hearts and minds of some of the best and most loyal staff a business could have, it seems that the Board of BA are 100% behind his absurd actions but this cannot be good for shareholders.

In the grip of the first strike, I had to travel to Germany. Our agency got quotes for the required travel times and BA came out at £800 for the planned journey vs Lufthansa's £237 - standard economy fares on a standard route. OK, so that was in the middle of the strike, but last week I flew to Milan and Lufthansa again came in at around £325 to the similar flight of BA's at over £700.

All along, it has never been about the cost cutting for me - it's been Walsh' abject lack of strategy and business acumen. How can you have a business that is going to succeed when it is charging such prices at recessionary times against its main rivals? Lufthansa is cleaning up - full planes each trip, efficiently run, on time and with decent service with real technological advantages like Boarding Cards via SMS. BA is lost in the wilderness between premium class and low cost. So what does it do with the cash injection it got? It buys the second largest loss making airline in Europe, Iberia, who is similarly placed and tries to combine them. Iberia is perhaps worse off - all its old premium roots into Malaga, Valencia and other cities are dominated by low cost airlines who fly customers in waves - supposedly cheaper - for no frills. BA inherits few new profitable roots, a heavy cost based business and a management equally defunct of ideas from an airline that does not yet lose as much money as BA.

But that's not all - less than a year after two decent airlines flying all business class service to New York went bust (and both were excellent), BA launches one from City Airport which flies just 32 people via Shannon for around £5,000 each. The target customers are City Bankers, the most hated part of society since the recession and credit crunch - Walsh could not have made a bigger PR and business blunder.

Yet he survives. The lack of strategy is almost childlike, the tackling of Unite is pathetic. You can feel it happening again as the whizz kids at Royal Mail found out when capitulating to the Unions for a cost much higher than originally asked for, that modern businesses cannot take prolonged industrial actions and Walsh will have to relent or let his business die. Why would you do that?

BA is basically ruined. It will never rise again to be the airline it was but maybe the world wants something different. The trust and belief that the loyal staff had prior to all this has been ruptured and will never be regained. Walsh has put a sword through the heart of what was one of Britain's best companies.

It takes some skill to be that incompetent; to make a once loyal and much loved staff strike to kill their own company. When BA was the world's favourite airline, it was all about the staff.

He simply does not get it, does he?

Hollow Victory

On the face of it, BA bloodied the nose of Unite union yesterday in the court ruling on the validity of the staff ballot to strike, making the planned 12 day stoppage over Christmas illegal.

While that may save Christmas for many BA passengers who had booked up with the airline, it is a hollow victory for the management. The staff had voted 9 to 1, that's 92%, in favour of strike action. BA's staff is overwhelmingly dissatisfied with its management to the extent it has taken the unusual step to strike. The warning bells are there that BA's tactic may seem like a victory in a battle but the war-proper has only now begun.

The union has quickly struck back to say they will re-ballot and put the case once again, properly, to the staff and now BA has the longer term uncertainty of when the real strike will begin. For BA passengers, there is now a hiatus and uncertainty - who would bother booking up new flights with BA when they don't know when the strike will be?

In fact, an argument could have been that at least management knew when the strike would be and they so could act to contain the damage - indeed, it could have worked the emotional blackmail of stranded passengers and disrupted Christmas's for many people to its advantage. But no, it just had to take a swipe at the union. In doing, so they have once again bashed the face of the staff who are so incensed at the company's actions that they were willing to kill Christmas for many customers.

BA don't get it - the staff are furious and want a compromise. BA just seems hell bent on killing its own business. As Robert Peston points out on his blog today, there are many serious issues which BA faces, not least that the hole in its pension fund is now valued higher than the worth of the company - and so it focuses on disenchanting its staff and compromising its revenue stream. They could not be in a worse place as they attempt to buy and integrate another failed airline, Iberian.

I have said it before and will bore you with it again - this is a management in no-man's land. It is killing its own business and seems to think that is a good thing. Change at the top is very urgently needed instead of the dreamer who runs it now.

Working Nine To One

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, is a perennial target of mine but, in fairness, he makes that easy.

I have described BA as a strategically lost company before and there has never been a worse moment for what was once the 'World's Favourite Airline'. It is being squeezed by low budget airlines at one end who consistently out perform expectations in terms of profit and by higher service airlines at the other end who focus on their niche market and make enough to survive. BA's two major 'strategic' moves in the last year have been to make a series of reactionary, 'knee jerk' slashes of its costs, with no real impact or direction, and then make arguably its biggest blunder, to buy another airline in the same strategic 'no man's land', Iberian.

In all of this, the backbone of the company has stuck with Walsh until yesterday when the staff who man the airlines voted nine to one in favour of a strike action, to leave the course of action in the hands of the union, Unite. Walsh seemed to suicidally want to fight his staff, having asked them to make sacrifice after sacrifice to the point when they finally made their stand over the 'dumbing down' of their roles. The company now faces a 12 day period of strike action over one of the busiest travel times of the year - Christmas. It could not have been a worse result for BA - it could not have been a more stupid move by management.

The recent BA history is a litany of business cock ups. Terminal 5's opening was about as inspiring as it got as a superb terminal was project managed in a schoolboy fashion, stress testing the unprepared systems with hordes of real passengers. Then we had the series of staff cost cuts that played with the fantastic loyalty of the staff only to shaft them by trashing their worth in the latest move. In between were two attempts to buy a dying airline in Spain, the first ending in farce as BA's market worth fell below that of their target at the crucial moment, and the launch of a business class only airline out of the City Airport with a capacity of just 32 seats which pandered to the whims of rich bankers when two similar services to the US had failed less than a year earlier.

The message in that service alone could not have been worse to staff, the shareholders and the public - BA was prepared to service rich bankers ahead of paying its staff with a service already proven to be unprofitable by two other companies.

I don't know what the shareholders think of Walsh as they seem to support him grimly, but we now know what the stakeholders think. The once highly vaunted air crews of the once great airline have voted categorically to fight him - and you know instinctively that he has lost his best weapon to survive because he has undervalued and disrespected it.

It's not as if you could not see this coming. It has been a quick process of losing the confidence of the staff and laying a scene for the battle. Walsh calls the action of the union 'cynical' but that's what you get when you lose the support of your staff. From a union's point of view there is no point striking when the airline does not fly - their tactics are generally to hit you were it hurts most as it quickly sparks negotiation, at a battlefield very much with the terrain in their favour. There are no surprises that this is exactly what has happened and it was about as obvious as the cock up at Terminal 5 as it all unravelled.

BA seems to be managed by fools. The strike action is not at all helpful. We can see the Royal Mail happening all over again with the one tragic ingredient for Walsh - the customers do have a choice. There are other airlines to fly - in fact, to Walsh's edification, the skies and airports are full of them. His strategic plan has been a series of schoolboy responses to a business game exercise.

I would say that BA needs a rapid change at the top to survive.

Take Off or Landing?

It's taken two years and arguably when it all started it seemed like a good idea, but the merger between BA and Iberia Airways has finally been agreed. Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, has hailed it as 'Good news for passengers'.

In the last 18 months of intense European travel, the two airlines I personally rate the worst for service are BA and Iberian so it could be said this the merger of two airlines who have lost their way and have resorted to the old adage of 'two heads are better than one'. Both companies made whacking great losses, with BA clocking up £292m in the last six months and Iberia €182m in the last nine months as they competed to be the airline who could clock up the most losses in the shortest time - it looks like a dead heat. The interesting thing is that passenger numbers are similar with BA at 33m and Iberian at 28m yet BA operate 246 aircraft to Iberian's 174 which suggests a disparity on loads. Also, the overlap on destinations means that both airlines get benefits but that creates a problem - how do you drive the kinds of savings you need to get any benefit and keep the same number of routes operating?

This is the real problem - the estimated £358m of savings nowhere near covers the combined loss and it is not clear how the savings will come about. The new headquarters will be in London and Walsh will be the new CEO - none of the news so far is actually very encouraging.

Ryan Air sees this as 'Two drunks propping themselves up' and for once they are spot on and not being loony. On the face of this it is exactly that - two airlines who had run out of ideas and strategy think that combining two worthless strategies and ailing businesses, led by donkeys, will actually solve their problems. It really is a merger devoid of inspirations, carved out of a desire first dreamt up in better days. While big can be beautiful, the merged companies are going to spend the next two years arguing over cuts and who does what as the industry emerges from recession. A really clever move by two companies that have hit the recession with no real idea what the core strengths of their airlines are.

Walsh's only victory seems to be that BA will be the dominant company with the HQ in London and 55% of the shares owned - and he is CEO which seems to be a sad indictment of the combined management talent of the two companies. BA has been particularly rudderless and idealess during this recession with an emphasis on lack of strategy and daft ideas on cost cutting, while their low cost competitors have thrived. As fuel prices came down to help costs, BA fared worse than before and the underlying profitability of the business is virtually broken. BA and Iberian are caught in the no man's land of European airline strategy and the combination of the position does not actually help them with such poor leadership at the top. No wonder the staff look to the HQ and ponder what will happen next.

One thing is for certain, two huge clouds hang over this merer long before they try to get any strategic or operational benefit - 1) the impending action by a once loyal staff against the suicidal efforts to cut costs and dumb-down jobs and 2) the enormous hole in BA's pension pot. The latter may yet scupper the deal while the former will blight it at every step because it is an issue that will only grow as the combined airline will strive for even greater cuts and efficiencies.

On thing is for certain, the worst news is that Willie Walsh has won the top job. It's the equivalent of asking a passenger to fly the plane.

Oh Willie, You're Not So Fine

Oh dear. In a week where the union, Unite, launched a legal action against BA in order to try and stop the imposition of new contracts, the news has just got worse.

Far worse.

BA's results to the end of September showed a £292m loss - far greater than had been predicted by most analysts. Revenue was unsurprisingly down by 13.7% and Willie Walsh, BA's clueless CEO, could only forlornly point to the fact that there is a recession on - a real 'no sh*t Sherlock' moment. Lord Sugar would surely have slapped him about the face for saying so, not least as Ryan Air had only released their figures a week before with excellent profits buoyed by a 40% decrease in fuel costs over the same period.

If that was factored into BA's results as well, it makes these results not just grim but catastrophic.

Confidence in the airline was not helped in the period as Walsh himself was involved in the high profile launch of what many believe to be a 'white elephant' new all-business class service between London's City Airport and New York, carrying just 32 passengers and stopping in Ireland on the way to refuel. Given much of BA's woes have stemmed from a dramatic decline in business class sales on other services, this seemed like either monumental madness or callous hubris in the face of the sacrifices made by staff in a desperate bid to save costs. It just seems a huge waste of money on a service almost certain to make a loss in the short and medium term - if ever - given two previous attempts to have a business class only service went belly up in happier times about a year ago and at least they had more passenger capacity and flew non-stop to their destinations.

I really am stumped over BA's strategy. They continue to just try to reduce costs and do the same thing when the industry has moved on. They are caught between offering premium services but trying to compete at the budget end and are failing at both.

I also find it hard to believe that shareholders grimly keep the faith with a CEO who is so clearly out of his depth, obsessed with using his dwindling funds to buy another struggling airline, Iberian, as his last, desperate and hopeless fling of the dice.

He really needs a strategy that hangs together before he spends so much wasteful money. At this rate he needs to horde as much as he can as BA is going nowhere fast.

From BAd To Worse

It seems not a day goes by without another tale of woe from BA and I have blogged before about an airline that is dying a death of a thousand cuts.

It turns out I was wrong - it's around 1,700 cuts, of jobs that is plus a pay freeze. Well that's just the latest round. Further, this is just a week after BA launched an ill-fated new Business Class only service to New York from City Airport when two such airlines operating similar models have gone bust inside the last 12 months. Despite CEO Willie Walsh claiming that this service would be profitable in a year, all indications are that it was dead before it took off. In the launch interview he even claimed BA was on the verge of buying another airline that is slowly dying, Iberia. I have said it before but I think Walsh is BA's problem - he just seems to lurch, punch drunk from one bad idea to the next and just does not seem to have in his mind a cogent strategy for survival. And that is the key here - after a £401m loss last year, the biggest since it privatised in 1987, BA will announce another loss this quarter and it is battling for survival. In many respects, an ill-starred takeover of another ailing airline is about the worst way to spend precious cash.

But Walsh soldiers on. Amidst several petty ways to save cash he is now taking on the Unions in promoting the idea that many staff should take early retirement or voluntary redundancy. There is also an issue over the roll of cabin crew for the future where the proposal is to drastically change the current roles, slashing their status and pay and bringing on new recruits at rock bottom prices. The staff are up in arms as, rightly, the former 'World's favourite Airline' had a good reputation on service and that's what kept customers loyal. But it seems that BA is losing itself in a 'Neverland' as it is caught in the vanilla whirlpool of budget airline menu-style services and high quality class service that customers pay a lot of money for. BA is a strategic dead duck and that flows right the way to the top. The final straw could be a strike of any sort - a prolonged one would almost certainly bring a failing airline to its knees.

Central to BA's woes has been the depletion of the higher class cabins as customers book more economy flights in the face of a recession. The passenger figures in that category are 13% down year on year and falling. Despite several silly offers to get people to upgrade by offering a free ticket when buying Club of First Class, or if you buy at economy ticket you are offered to buy an upgrade on one or more legs for idiotic prices considering you have usually just paid over the odds for a higher priced ticket anyway, BA has not stopped the exodus from the higher class seats. This means that these seats at the front of the airline are going empty.

But BA have several other problems, to my mind. The first is a silly rigidity about changing tickets once bought. If you arrive for a flight early and want to see if you can get on an earlier flight, BA, unless you have paid stupid money for a fully flexible ticket, do not allow such a useful thing. It means that seats go empty on the early flight but had they been filled, the later flight would have empty seats which BA would then have time to sell. And at any price, as it would be incremental money. Not so with BA (many airlines suffer from this dumb logic). They actually try to charge more for these newly freed up seats and so they remain empty whereas simple logic would say as long as you are covering the cost of the meal and and the fuel, you are making some money rather than cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Further, it remains to be seen whether Walsh and his management team understand where the future lies for BA. You can cut costs easily in a business like that without thinking hard and the biggest issue will be the Unions. Given that you think that you can handle the Unions, what is it you want to the airline to do after you have cut all the costs and ditched the staff? Do you want to be a flagship, high service carrier or do you want to be a low budget, menu-service airline? If so the latter, you are in the wrong place today as your hubs are the two most expensive of airports and you have a purpose-built terminal to handle customers. Yet that's what seems to be the plan - as BA sequentially withdraw simple things like meals and seat booking to charge for them but they do not lower the prices of the ticket in return.

In the middle of all this remains the staff - loyal and capable people who love the airline and give the service that the company was once famed for and proud to advertise. Effectively, Walsh is trashing their skills and abilities and looking to replace them with 'Easyjet-style' crew. The result could be tragic in terms of service - make no bones about it. The difference in the levels of ability and skill of cabin staff between low budget and BA is enormous and there is an immense confidence factor involved. If an incident occurred in mid air, I know who I would want to be running the plane - I think I best summarise it as that. On the last Easyjet flight I was on, we were served by a young man wearing a stewardess's outfit bought from a joke shop with his boxer shorts sticking out from his mini skirt as the staff laughed at the unwitting groom-to-be and took photos. Good fun but airlines are, in fact, serious business.

I wonder why the investors in BA carry on with the current management. From the Terminal 5 total fiasco to the series of knee-jerk, almost fag-packet attempts to save the business to a total lack of strategy, the airline is slowly dying and Walsh seems powerless and witless to do anything about it. The enduring image I have of him of late is his interview on the converted Airbus 318 taking off from City Airport, refuelling at Shannon and going on to New York running an already dead Club-only service for just 100 passengers talking of his new attempt to take over an equally dying airline, Iberia.

It was all wishful thinking.

Slow Going At Iberia Airways

I read only yesterday that demand for Iberia Airways had slowed. How serendipitous it was that I was sat in Barcelona Airport enduring a delay at the hands of the same airline.

The two things may have been an unfortunate happenstance but taken with my experience of flying out with people over-packed in a small departure area at Gate 11 in Heathrow Terminal 3, getting onto a heaving plane and taking off an hour late, perhaps it is the norm for the airline. On board, everything is chargeable and although the flight attendants are invariably polite, handsome or pretty, it doesn't make up for the fact you are shelling out a whacking €2.50 for a tomato juice.

The return journey had all the hallmarks of a smooth event. I arrived early-ish to see if I could get on the earlier flight. Iberia is one of the few airlines who actually will try to get you a seat on an earlier flight without laughing in your face and asking you to pay a bank bail out figure for a new ticket as BA does. They tried, but the flight was full. I thought to myself that the Telegraph clearly does not know what it is talking about when it comes to demand. But the Barcelona-London route is incredibly popular.

In the week, I had to arrange a flight to Barca, then on to Madrid and back to London. Iberia came out as over £900 for the itinerary. I costed it up using Easyjet for the out and inbound legs and it was half the price. Iberia clearly have a price problem as they are competing against budget airlines but trying to pass off their service as premium.

So sitting at Barcelona airport yesterday I noted that all the Easyjet flights got away on time and that many Iberia flights were half empty to destinations like Lyon and Bordeaux. So when a London flight was called, I duly queued only to find that in fact I was in the line for the earlier flight to London which should have taken off two hours before and was turned away for obvious reasons. Reassuringly, our flight was called next and it seemed to be maybe just a few minutes late only. We got aboard the bus to take us, having had our boarding cards torn or the copies taken, passports were checked and on we went. The bus did a languid circuit before arriving at the plane and the two pilots could be seen doing their checks in the cockpit. The bus stayed outside, doors firmly shut and pumping humid air into the passenger compartment. The notion was dawning that something was wrong. A lady in a yellow jacket walked down the steps, muttering into her walkie-talkie, struggling to put on her sunglasses to look more officious and conferred with our driver. Without a word, he nodded and we were driven back to the gate and the doors opened and, like condemned sheep at the slaughterhouse, we disembarked without a single word uttered to any of us. When inside the gate we learned that the pilot was not actually checking his instruments but more likely barfing into a bag as he had come over all sick. Or perhaps it was a ruse as he had tickets to a bullfight or whatever, or was on a promise.

We were told that a new pilot would be found - relax, they are an airline after all so they should have plenty. We sat back in our places and waited a while. Then the chaos started.

An announcement told us that the flight was now delayed until 18.45 which was over a two hours delay. People were disgruntled but slowly began to disperse and I went upstairs, found a bar and sat down with my paper, a packet of peanuts and a frothy cerverza. I had munched the bag of peanuts and taken two sips of the amber nectar when an announcement, barely audible above the hub-bub, told me that the flight was now delayed until 19.00. I sat back and sipped my beer, called my wife and tried to chill out.

Minutes, later, maybe half a pint's worth, an announcement told us that the flight was ready for boarding. It seemed we were getting away no more than an hour late at this rate. I gulped down the half of beer I had left, picked up my bags and went to the gate where a small throng of people had accumulated but was suspiciously, and markedly, smaller than the original number that had tried to get on the flight. After several more sweaty minutes, the buses arrived and we had the daft charade of staff trying to work out who we were from the remains of our boarding passes; the security guys just wafted us past without looking at our passports and we got on the bus. Someone told me that a pilot had arrived from Madrid and was, I assume, about to knock off but was told to take the plane to London and back. It's hardly the same as asking a taxi driver to do one more fare, this was a 4-6 hour round trip. I didn't even think about whether his inbuilt tachometer had enough hours left, the instinct to get home was strong. We all boarded and there were chaotic scenes as a family seated around me found that there were already people in their places. A farcical game of musical chairs was played and the poor chap who lost just stood there like a lemon holding his boarding card stub with a face like a slapped backside thinking, 'What about me?'. He was duly whisked off the business class which he seemed consoled about until he realised it was two small rows at the front with a curtain behind it.

Amid all the confusion, three things struck me. One, my row was empty except me. Two, there seemed to be far less people on the flight that had originally queued and three, a rather annoying tape of music was playing of really drab music sung by the likes of Katie Melua. An announcement proclaimed that indeed, passengers had dispersed across the acreage of Barcelona airport and many could not be found - we were 24 short and could not take off without them. The tape whined on, louder if anything.

We waited with increasing agitation for the missing people as the tape played on and you could feel a Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch brewing. People arrived and there was more confusion as another family arrived to try and sit exactly where the first family had displaced the original occupants of the rows around me. Once more there was a game of musical chairs ending in the bizarre situation of one family being split by the other - how they could not have been rearranged simply so that each sat together seemed beyond the pretty airhostesses, but organisation was not to be their strength.

The first fuse blew a few seconds later, as a pompous grey-haired Englishman threw down his Blackberry in rage and screeched for the music to be turned off. He had peaked too early - the pilot simultaneously announced that due to the late arrivals we had missed our take off slot and now had to wait until 19.40 to get away. Given we had started to board at around 18.15, this was a long time to spend on the plane in the turgid heat, listening to the moaning music. Tempers were starting the fray.

The pompous man pressed his call button for the first time and the hostess arrived swiftly. He demanded to know why we were late. She explained in clipped English that passengers had thought that the plane would not take off until 19.00 and so had gone to eat and clearly had not heard the new announcement. Fortunately, everything was running so late that when they came down to board for the time they thought they had to, we were all waiting for them. He was particularly dissatisfied and started a rant about the fact that no one had offered any free drinks or a sandwich, which was a fair point, and it may be sensible to crack open the bar with some freebies to keep the punters happy. She smiled sweetly and said she needed higher authorisation and the man replied, 'Who? The bloody Pope?'

This final remark was returned with a frosty glare and his card had obviously been marked. I mentally noted to myself that if I were him, I wouldn't order a sandwich tonight as visions of 'Road Trip' and french toast came to mind. He chanced his arm at one last thing before the hostess retreated - could she change the damn tape as it was driving him crackers. She smiled and said yes and left. She did not change the tape, if anything, I could have sworn it got louder as some fool droned out a cover of 'What a Wonderful World' for what seemed the nth time.

We sat and waited for the take off slot and mercifully the captain managed to get the air conditioning to work and an ominous vapour appeared above the overhead lockers as fresh, cool air was pumped into the stuffy cabin. The pompous man started nattering his complaints to a general audience, none of whom spoke back or looked at him. He was now openly declaring it would be the last time he flew on Iberian and I could feel the share price almost plummet as he spoke. And the tape was now, he made clear to us all, 'Doing my bloody head in.' He had a point - the damn thing was now playing, for at least the third time, a saxophone version of 'Hark the herald angels sing' which was highly inappropriate, and awful, given the stifling humidity of the cabin. I realised that I had heard the very same tape on the flight over and the whole jigsaw of why Iberian were suffering lower passenger manifests was now dawning on me. The service was rubbish and the music was crap.

At precisely 19.15, for no apparent reason and without warning, the captain started his engines and we trundled off from our position. He came on the intercom and said that we were still on for a 19.40 take off but he would hold at a point to wait his turn at the end of the runway and it might be useful in case we were given an earlier slot. I liked his style while mentally trying to calculate how much precious fuel that might burn in doing so and approximately what tonnage of CO2 we might be unnecessarily pumping into the atmosphere but erased the thought as the lure of getting home and having a cold glass of wine and a shower was far too strong.

We got to our holding point and, as if the pilot had seen a gap in the traffic, we rapidly turned onto the runway and, again without any warning, we gunned our engines and we were hurtling down the runway at a rate of knots, giving the air crew just enough time to stow their accessories from the safety demo and get to their seats. We were airborne in short order and still the music droned on above the scream of the engines as the plane sought height with the City lights to our left, the sea to our right and turbulence all around us. The skipper announced he had got clearance to go - which was a relief to us all as I had visions of some other captain shouting into his radio, 'Oi, stop that man. That's my take off slot,' or worse - and he said that the expected flight time would be one hour and fifty minutes but he would see if he could shorten that. Whether his Sat Nav allowed the selection of shortest and fastest routes, I don't know, but maybe he knew a short cut across the Bay of Biscay or he was just going to keep the throttle at maximum. I opened my book while nervously hoping that he was keeping a close eye on that fuel gauge after all.

The inflight service is rubbish on Iberia. I actually bought a sandwich combi which included a beer. The beer was fine, the sandwich dry and tasteless and all for €9.50 which would have made Michael O'Leary slather with excitement. The pompous man was moaning about free drinks but did not mention the Pope again, although he did once more ask if the tape could be changed or turned down. Again the staff smiled and nothing further was done about it. The families around me snored quietly despite the bumpy ride and before we knew it, we were descending toward Heathrow. Of course, as we had evidently nicked someone else's slot across France, we had arrived early and we were sent to detention in a holding pattern somewhere near Croydon as we flew repeatedly over the 'twenty pence' building by the station at East Croydon. The music had been turned up as part of the landing preparations and now the pompous man was scrunched up in his seat with his eyes shut and fingers placed in his ears. Every now and then he would take them out and shout, 'This effing music is doing my head in,' to which a lady near by said, 'Just effing ignore it like the rest of us.' The retort was a mistake as clearly he wanted to engage someone in the argument and he berated her for the poor service, delays, and rubbish music as if the lady owned the airline. She took it all pretty well before calmly saying, 'I hope you feel better for getting that off your chest. Sadly, for you, I can do bugger all about it so just shut up.' I was waiting to join in the round of applause but there was none so I just pretended I was clapping along to the music.

When we finally got on our approach, the plane was blown all over the place with the engine pitch going up and down like a dentist's drill. Looking out of the window I was sure we were being blown off course or would land upside down - if we had any fuel left. But as always, just feet above the runway, the air seemed clear but it did not stop the captain from putting down the plane with a huge thump, on one wheel. As soon as he got the second down, the nose went down with a mighty bang and the brakes were applied very heavily. The music went up several decibels and we were back at someone's monotonous version of 'Clouds' which the pompous man screamed at.

More chaos ensued as the plane stopped short of its parking position and several Koreans leapt to their feet to retrieve their bags from the overheads. One locker opened and a laptop bag, complete with laptop inside, dropped out and bounced off the side of a man's head. The Korean was unrepentant while the man rubbed his head in bewilderment - if only it had been the pompous man. It was clear several people had connecting flights to places like Korea, New Zealand and Australia but there were no announcements about priorities or that there were staffing waiting - it was every man for himself. Duly, the pompous man bellowed into his phone that his driver was to take him for an 'effing curry' and he got his bag and started barging his way down the plane. At this point, I had had enough as he was distressing an Indian gentleman who was trying to herd his kids in the cramped space ahead of me. I made myself 'big' which is difficult for a small chap but all those years of rugby finally paid off. The man attempted to get past but I just stood my ground.

'Some of us are in an effing hurry,' he said, possibly to whoever was on his Blackberry as he still had it to his ear. I ignored the comment. He then began pushing, while still jabbering into his phone. I stood still - the kids were delaying us all but I didn't care as I deliberately waved people ahead of me to carry on. Pompous man lost it. 'I said I was in an effing hurry,' he said to the back of my head as if I cared.

We finally got off the plane and as we were on the jetway, pompous man tried to overtake. I blocked his line skillfully and he really got angry as he told whoever was on the phone that he would call back. 'What's your problem?' he demanded of me, as he tried to struggle past. 'The kids on the jetway don't need to get run over by people like you or listen to your language, mate. Just grow up and wait your turn,' was my terse reply.

He wasn't impressed, then again that wasn't the aim. He waited for his opportunity at the end of the jetway and then stormed past mouthing something to himself which clearly made him feel better. The glorious moment came when we got to Passport Control. There were literally thousands of people in a massive queue going back out of the hallway. Pompous man barged his way through to the Fast Track lane and he literally sprinted down it. We all slowly made our way into the normal section where a sign said '25 minutes wait from this point'. Minutes later, pompous man was being led back in angry conversation with an immigration official who was telling him that the black restrainer he had ignored was to show that Fast Track was closed. As pompous man tried to blend into the queue way ahead of the end, a rather burly bloke next to me put an arm out and said, 'Go to the end, smart arse - I've had enough of you for one night.' In splendid slow motion, he was led away by the official toward the back of the huge queue stretching all the way back almost to our jetway. It was the last I saw of the idiot.

But my focus on the pompous man served a purpose. I could have been pompous man with great ease. I usually get very uptight about airline service and delays - more specifically the lack of information. In this instance, the information had not only been lacking but the little that did come out was conflicting, causing further, unnecessary delays. Iberia should have laid on a few drinks or food vouchers, there were a lot of kids on the flight and they must have been hungry and thirsty by the time we took off, some three hours late. There is no excuse for poor or no communication and it is the single most irritating thing about air travel. You expect it of Ryan Air and Easyjet as they have the mind set that 'what you don't pay for, you don't get' and with them service is certainly that, respect is another. But Iberia are not low budget and they are not cheap.

So if Iberia Airways has a problem on demand then last night's performance will not have helped as there were many on the flight who vowed never to use them again - I dare say pompous man was one and I was certainly another.

One last comment on the joys of international travel - what on earth was happening at Terminal 3? Going out on Wednesday was bad enough as the terminal was crowded to the gills and the departure gate seating far too small for the manifest of people for the aircraft which took an age to check through. But passport control was a shambles coming back last night, with at least a thousand people queuing and very few positions manned. When they did, eventually, open up a couple more positions, the staff then blatantly took an age to check each passport, almost inviting the inevitable rudeness they got from several people. The queuing system was shambolic as well with people shoving and moving around and no actual lines formed. Contrast this to somewhere like the US where there are regularly large volumes of people to be checked, there are always well organised lines and people to direct you, however officious and sour-faced they may be.

Heathrow is decending into a mess and depsite a brand new terminal being built to ease the loads on the others, it has got far, far worse. It is not a pretty sight for foreign travellers arriving, it's chaos for EU arrivals and it has nothing to do with more rigorous checks - it is simply lack of staff at peak times and slow systems that take around 30 seconds to check a home country passport.

That, at least, cannot be blamed on the luckless Iberian Airlines.

The Glamour of International Travel

As I sit in alone in a small room in Barcelona, where I have somehow damaged the airconditioning switch so that I am inside a medium sized refrigerator when the outdoor temperature is 25 degrees, I am once again pondering what's good about international travel.

A young American lady sitting across the aisle on the plane over told me that she was spending 4 months in Spain and was looking forward to it. I agreed - it was a great adventure. She asked me how long I would be in Spain and I replied one night. After a day in meetings, I was to spend a night in the hotel and then another morning of meetings, then plane home. I must have done this a hundred times in the last year, it seems, and I cannot remember the last time I actually kicked back and had a moment to myself to enjoy some of the spectacular cities I have visited, from Rome to Stockholm to the inside of Copenhagen airport only. I lie. Now that I think of it, I did manage a trip around the harbour of Hamburg in an open top boat, breathing diesel fumes, sun beating on my head and sweating profusely in a suit. I saw several scrap heaps, empty dry docks and Roman Abramovich's new yacht covered in plastic - and all the while I kept glancing at my watch worrying that I would be late for my meeting.

The day had not started well. Due to travel costs, the cheapest flight got me to Barcelona just 40 minutes before my meeting, cutting it all very fine. The plane was packed so full that there was nowhere near enough room in the departure lounge, let alone on the aircraft, for us all to comfortably sit. It was fashionably, but bloody annoyingly late - by well over an hour and so my slim margin of error was already burnt away before I started, causing one of those stupidly fractious journeys where I felt like going onto the flight deck and telling the pilot to put his foot down. How he would have laughed and either shot me as a terrorist or pointed to the throttle as being a lever not a pedal.

In the cost consious era of business travel, I found myself in the section called 'Basic' as classified by Iberia Airways - a euphemism for 'abattoir class'. This is a level that makes Ryan Air look like the Orient Express. A mere tomato juice cost €2.50, rivalling any of O'Leary's rip offs. The good news was that they do not charge extra for check in, bags, jetways or fast queuing - just get to the front and stand up quickly. And you get a real seat allocated to you beforehand. That made the return flight to Barcelona exactly half what I paid for a recent Ryan Air one way trip from Frankfurt-Hahn airport to Stansted. Oh yes, believe me - Ryan Air advertise cheap flights but I paid, with check in, priority boarding and one tiny bag in the hold, exactly double the price to go for a flight double the distance to Barcelona, both ways. One other, nit-picking point - Frankfurt-Hahn airport is around 200km from Frankfurt, and is a god forsaken hell-hole infested by more flies than a festival of rancid horse manure. Granted it was hot but even I couldn't see the waitress in the small cafe for the fog of flies in the room. Some of us think London Luton is stretching the imagination, but this is like calling Birmingham Airport a London airport.

Whenever I mention what I do or where I go, it always sounds good that I have been to Germany last week and Spain this week etc. But when you sit like 'Billy Nomates' alone catching up on the day's emails and messages with a motley room service sandwich half eaten at your side and only two channels with English on and both are boring business news running the same endless loop, it really is not as glamourous as it sounds.

Tomorrow is 28 degrees in Barcelona - I am only hoping the office I visit has good ventilation or else it will be another day in a sticky shirt, preying for a shower. Hands up all those who know what I'm talking about.