An Easter sunshine rush won’t ensure a bright future for BA

theguardian.com:

So will the Easter getaway herald the resurrection of British Airways and its owner International Airlines Group (IAG), or will the computer say no? The first big holiday break of the year and the start of the summer season should, according to IAG forecasts, bring a bumper crop of passengers after the grim first two years of the pandemic.

The flag carrier expects to fly at full capacity on its most lucrative transatlantic services this summer, and last week returned to some outposts it had deserted at the height of the pandemic: Sydney in Australia, and London’s Gatwick and City airports.

But if the fear of Covid – if not the actual rate of infection – is receding, it has become clear that BA has yet to rid its systems of bugs. Customer service has been a recurrent complaint – shedding thousands of staff can’t have helped – and was again put to the test in recent weeks. A series of IT failures led to the airline suffering ripples of apparently self-inflicted cancellations.

BA has history with IT problems. Even if Covid has overshadowed any previous nightmares, the reappearance of this particular problem will have agitated investors as well as infuriating passengers. A pandemic is a decent excuse, but BA and IAG have had years to sort out these dodgy tech issues.

The biggest failure, in days when such disruptions were front-page news, came five years ago, with thousands of passengers stranded at Heathrow and around the world. The response to the crisis of the then relatively new BA boss Álex Cruz, criticised – fairly or not – as sluggish, appeared to spell the beginning of the end for the Spaniard.

The current leadership has seen bigger problems, but solving this one could prove a headache for IAG boss Luis Gallego, who once