Sao Paulo, Brazil
18/03/12 10:40
Great infrastructure wasted by dreadful management. To use a good airline (Air France) you have to endure the disaster of their home airport. Charles De Gaul has normally very good security, with a fast track for business customers but it is managed by the weakest managers in the world as the bus system is chaos and the bust drivers control the whole place. The contrast to arriving in Guarulhos, Sao Paulo’s airport was marked. Immigration was quick virtually empty (Although this is not always the case. It can take an age to leave or arrive here). But from the plane to the bus pick up area was less than 15 mins. In Paris it took them 15 mins to get us off the plane, 10 mins to get us to the terminal and the driver was trying to kill the passengers with his dreadful driving, accelerating and braking so hard at the stupid amount of stop signs that children and adults were falling all over the bus. Then when you arrive you need to read several boards, to find the terminal for your connecting flight, as they list all flights by terminal not anywhere on one list. Then you need to wait for a bus to move from the terminal to next terminal. Again the driver has no concern for the passenger as they race between stop signs. Then if you are really unlucky your plane will be not at the terminal on a air gate but on a remote stand served by yet another buss. They will herd you onto overcrowded busses, shout at you and make you wait for the late arrivals before taking you to the plane, whilst scowling at you as though you ruined their day coming to their place of work. CDG is a very bad example of an airport but frankly none of the worlds major airports in the first world are very good. I do not understand why the airlines that pay for these anyway through their customers do not get together and buy those useless airport operators out. The airports ruin what would be a good and pleasant travelling experience for most travellers. I know, yesterday was my 30th flight in 5 weeks and the 9th long haul. Most of the experience, even on the stupidly overcrowded hub link planes to heathrow, provided by BA were very good. Happy helpful caring even sometimes staff. Whereas the airports and security staff make you feel like criminals and treat you like badly behaved children. Read More...
Knoxville, TN, USA
11/03/12 10:39
Great infrastructure wasted by the useless USA homeland security immigration management. I flew into Chicago this week and unfortunately I have another flight booked to go through this chaos in another few weeks but in future I will avoid it like the plague. Two hours to get through immigration and only then because I asked 100 plus people if I could pass them to make my connecting flight. A stupid set up. Dreadful management and on top of that an interfering officer instructed all US passport holders to bypass the queue for those in transit and come in front of us so that we made no progress at all even though the US passport area already had fewer people queuing and more immigration stations open. There were three area in the “system” US or green card holder, Direct to the city and in transit. However, neither of the non US queues were managed, so those with transit flights were stuck behind people who were going directly into the city with no flight connections to make. There are lots of small airports in the US that accept international flyers it is best to go in through them.Leaving Chicago was no better. The first and business lanes were full of economy passengers so it took over an hour to get to security check. The cost of doing business in the US is not worth it. Compare it to China I can usually be on the road waiting for my pick up in less than 20mins from the plane arriving on stand. The time to exit is equally quick. Even the experience in Terminal five which can sometimes be OK was marred by the security staff stopping and making all the customers wait while they watched two lady security staff having an argument. How stupid can it get when you are trying to reach a flight with a short time to have to stand in a hot sticky queue after a 9 hour flight to have to see thirty security staff ignore all their work and just watch and laugh at two idiots arguing about their work. How great it looked to all the non British travellers standing their arriving in the UK to see this as their first experience of the UK. Read More...
Lodz, Poland
05/03/12 10:38
The weeks started very badly when I arrived in Terminal five for a BA flight to be told I had to transfer and thus go through extra security to terminal three, which is probably the worst terminal in heathrow. BAA think it is a sauna and a restaurant combined not a waiting place for a plane. I was cross with BA as they did not say on the web that the flight to Warsaw has now moved to terminal 3. If they had I would never have used their service to fly to Warsaw. I could have gone several different routes out of Edinburgh to avoid this chaos. Read More...
Milan and lenno, Italy
27/02/12 10:37
TOC facilitated project to improve dramatically On Time performance and the completion of a Jonah programme. Read More...
Beijing, China
24/02/12 11:42
TOC facilitated operational excellence management development session using TOC Thinking Processes to develop business plan Read More...