Airline Working to Get a Grip on Baggage Problem

British Airways is the world’s largest airline, and now it has a world-class public relations problem on its hands.

Thousands of BA passengers leaving from London’s Heathrow Airport have been arriving at their destinations around the globe without their luggage because of a labor dispute. And, not surprisingly, they’re not very happy.

“I’m outraged,� said Linda DeFato of Phoenix, who flew from Heathrow to Los Angeles on Oct. 27, then discovered that her three bags were missing. One of the bags finally arrived in Phoenix six days later; the second arrived last Sunday and the third came Tuesday, she said.

“They have no kind of crisis management in that company,� DeFato complained in a telephone interview Thursday. “No one ever took any responsibility. I will never give them my business again.�

On two different occasions in the last two weeks, BA baggage handlers temporarily stopped transferring bags through the carrier’s Heathrow terminals.

The result has been that passengers arrive at their final destinations while their bags and boxes sit idle back in London. With each work stoppage, more than 7,000 pieces of luggage stacked up at BA’s terminals, leaving passengers furious and airline executives scrambling to repair the damage.

The baggage handlers are upset with BA’s plan, announced in mid-September, to eliminate 5,000 jobs and cut other costs in such operations as baggage handling, perhaps by using non-BA subcontractors.

Heathrow, which is dominated by British Airways, is the major gateway to Europe and is the world’s fifth-busiest airport. Most of the affected passengers, like DeFato, had flown to Heathrow and then transferred to other flights.

“The passengers are angry with us,� said Tony Griffin, BA’s customer services chief at Los Angeles International Airport. “Our focus now is to recover the goodwill of the passengers.�

He said BA was compensating inconvenienced passengers on the spot, giving them $75 to buy toiletries or other essential items if needed.

John Lampl, a BA spokesman in New York, said, “We’ve had 40 to 50 overtime people working on the problem [in London], and we’re hoping that by tomorrow all the bags get shipped to their proper destinations and owners.�

But Lampl conceded that it is possible the baggage handlers could strike again unless a settlement is reached. “There are meetings going on between management and the unions to resolve this issue,� he said.

The luggage snafus will probably prove to be expensive and embarrassing setbacks for Britain’s flagship airline, which operates 500 flights out of Heathrow daily, including two to LAX. BA flies to more than 80 countries.

The overtime labor costs, extra shipping expenses and the claims likely to be filed by angry customers could cost BA millions of dollars. There’s also the untold damage to the reputation of the airline, which has tried to improve its service since it was sold by the government to private investors in 1987.

The latest baggage slowdown began Monday and was compounded when a baggage computer system broke down. The system electronically reads a bar code on each bag to help move it to the right airplane, but its failure forced BA to handle everything by hand, Lampl said.

“Consequently, things got backed up very quickly,� he said.

On Wednesday, for instance, the two BA flights that arrived at LAX together were missing more than 300 pieces of luggage, Griffin said, and British news reports said 4,000 bags were still backed up at Heathrow on Thursday morning.

There have been other complications. At LAX, the U.S. Customs Service--concerned about terrorism and drug smuggling--is manually inspecting many of the delayed bags rather then letting them simply flow through an X-ray machine, adding to the time it’s taking for the bags to be forwarded to passengers.

BA has also been trying to expedite matters by flying Southern California-bound bags in bulk to LAX, where they’re then sorted and forwarded via Federal Express to their owners. BA is using the same procedure in New York for passengers in the East.

Times researcher Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.