On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 11:38:14 GMT, Harvey Van Sickle
wrote:

On 13 Aug 2005, Andy Hall wrote
On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:09:47 GMT, Harvey Van Sickle
wrote:

(Where BA shot themselves in the foot was by out-sourcing their
catering to save a few bob: by doing that, they get caught in
third- party crossfire. They get all the grief an blame, with no
control over the solution. Chickens/home/roost/to/coming stuff.)

Outsourcing is simply a way of not having to deal with non-core
aspects of a business.

Agreed, but an airline is a service industry, and the passenger
experience *is* an essential core aspect of that business. It differs
fundamentally from, say, building and fuelling the planes.


Well..... the passenger experience thing is what the airlines traded
on for years and moderately successfully.

Then passengers decided that they wanted to buy on price and not
service (or the airlines convinced them of it).




When you out-source some aspects of your core business in service
industry -- like passenger servicing, call centres, or reservations --
you clearly lose direct control over that part of your core business
and can only influence it indirectly.

Most airlines outsource their passenger handling and catering at many
remote locations and have done for some time.

As far as reservations are concerned, most have been progressively
screwing the travel agents over the last few years and driving
passengers towards buying restricted electronic tickets on line. This
is going in the opposite direction and not always that helpful to
travellers.



--

..andy

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