BAA could learn from grocers

By the time you read this, the national disgrace and nightmare that was the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 may have faded from memory, although I wouldn’t bet on it.

I suspect that this sad and avoidable debacle will do the sort of lasting damage to British Airways’ reputation that the minor glitch on the maiden voyage of the Titanic did to the White Star Line.

As I write, the BBC has just been discussing BA’s inspired “keep it complicated” idea of trucking its growing mountain of luggage to Milan for sorting. Now, DFS has been doing business in Italy for more than a quarter of a century, building relationships so strong that our principal Italian suppliers call us family.

Believe me, there are no limits to my admiration for their design skills, innovation and their capacity to generate excitement. Italian warmth and hospitality is renowned worldwide and their buffalo mozzarella, parmesan cheese, Neapolitan tomatoes and risotto are tasty in the extreme. And Italian suits, while a little bit on the tight side, are absolutely exquisite.

But if I had to choose someone to organise my laundry, I would not dream of them. I’d be looking for a nation that can make the trains run on time – Switzerland perhaps.

BA made the classic error of bragging to the whole world about their wonderful new facility and planned the official opening and knees-up without checking properly that the thing would actually work.

It is beyond my mental capacity, and I suspect that of many readers, to grasp how billions in investment and months of supposed planning could be thrown into chaos by, allegedly, something so simple as a defective car park barrier inhibiting eager baggage handlers getting to work.

It’s like seeing a classic car completely disabled at the very start of a vintage car rally by the failure of a rotor arm costing a few pence and nobody having thought it might be an idea to bring a spare.

You just cannot rely on expertise alone. It takes about seven years of rigorous study to qualify as an architect, yet a generation of DFS stores were designed with a boiler room perfect in internal scale and detail, but with the door too small to get the boiler through. Call me picky, but is it unreasonable to expect someone to have thought of that?

Common sense, like on-time BA domestic flights, is rare. Thankfully, the British retail industry possesses it by the container load. Combined with experience, those are the qualities that enable our leading food retailers to manage their growth programmes so slickly delivering new superstores on time, on budget and operating like clockwork from day one.

And they have to gear up to meet peak demand from the instant their doors open, without the luxury of a phased transfer of customers like an airport terminal.

Perhaps BA and BAA should have put in a phone call to Tesco or Sainsbury’s – organisations that do have a clue what they are doing. They might have learnt a thing or two.

Lord Kirkham, founder, DFS