Turbulence hits British Airways

Traveller's World A BA strike is back on the agenda after this week's balloting of the cabin crew.

A British Airways (BA) strike is back on the agenda after this week's balloting of the cabin crew. The 12-day strike organised over the Christmas and New year period was aborted because of a legal technicality concerning a few staff who had taken voluntary redundancy being invited to vote on the issue. But it was always going to be a temporary reprieve and new voting papers were sent out on Monday. It will take around three weeks to collate the results and a strike is likely to take place in March. Once again it is not about pay but about new working arrangements. They will have to work harder as crews will be cut from 15 to 14 on most long haul flights and work patterns will change. BA lost around US$650m (Dh2,386m) in the last financial year and is heading for even greater losses this year. A strike would be disastrous - the airline would take years to recover from industrial action and just the threat of it is ruinous - creating conditions in which more cuts will become necessary. So on the face of it, logic says that staff must be mad to pursue this route. But I was struck while talking to a stewardess friend recently about the gulf between the two sides. To my surprise, this mild-mannered, intelligent girl said that she had voted for the initial strike. She and her colleagues had had no idea that it was planned for the festive holiday period and she thought it below the belt for the union to have attempted to ruin a million people's vacations, but her greater anger was reserved for the management. My friend has worked for the company for more than 20 years and had been proud to be with an airline, which even if it was no longer the world's best, was up there with the best. "Now I am embarrassed," she says. "Standards have slipped so much. I now don't even like to tell people whom I work for. We could tell them what is wrong and how to fix it but they don't want to know." It is her sense of disenfranchisement that is eating away at her. Given a voice, this is her way of telling the management she thinks they are rubbish. As a mother of two young boys and living 805km from Heathrow because of her husband's job she is also worried about the impact of the new shifts which will make it harder to juggle home and work. My reaction was "welcome to the real world". It has always seemed that her working arrangements have been excessively comfortable compared to the rest of us. So I thought of her when BA ratcheted up the pressure on crew by threatening to remove the coveted travel privileges from any staff who take part in a walkout. All staff receive 90 per cent discounts on air fares for themselves and their nominated family or friends as long as seats are available. Also after five years service, crew members are eligible for one set of free tickets to anywhere on the BA network per year. The warning came in a letter from BA's head of cabin crew, Bill Francis. The perks are apparently not part of the contract and the loss will worry my friend and many of her colleagues far more than the loss of pay thanks to any change in shift work. Chief executive Willie Walsh has also called for ground staff to start retraining as cabin crew, which again is perfectly legal. It is hard to see a bleaker outlook - loss of perks for the crew, a disaster for the company, and relationships between different types of staff so fractured that we, the passengers, will be unable to escape breathing in the air of animosity.

This is the time of the year when last year's anecdotal evidence translates into hard numbers. If you thought hotels in the UAE dropped their prices last autumn, you were right. The average rate of a room fell by 21 per cent in November, year on year. The figures come from STR Global, the research company. It also reveals that occupancy was down to 58.9 per cent in November from 89.3 per cent in the same month in the previous year, relieving pressure on consumers. Figures released by the UN World Tourism Organisation also show that tourists visiting the Middle East declined by six per cent in 2009 from the year before, but the figures began to recover dramatically in the second half of the year, and they have forecast a return to positive growth for 2010. Business Monitor International (BMI), the risk analysis and forecasting body, is cautiously optimistic about the outlook for the UAE. It has revised its negative growth forecast from minus three per cent to minus two per cent based on a growing domestic travel market. "Taking on board the relatively modest growth in tourist arrivals to Dubai in [the first quarter] of 2009 and very disappointing data on visitors to Sharjah over the same period, BMI maintains a rather poor outlook for the UAE tourism sector in the short term." Oh dear, but it goes on: "Recovery in growth in arrivals is anticipated in 2010 and will pick up from 2011 with stronger growth rates than our earlier forecasts."

That faith is reflected by the industry, which continues to invest here. STR figures show there are currently 442 hotels in the pipeline across the Middle East and Africa region, with a total of 120,440 new rooms. Top of the list is Dubai with 29,727 rooms open for business and 15,291 rooms currently under construction. Abu Dhabi comes next with 13,701 new rooms planned and 6,939 already under construction. Interestingly, 25 per cent of the regional total comes under the "unaffiliated" sector; hopefully that means more boutique hotels are on the way. Not that all the hotels described as being in the pipeline are a surety. It was announced this week that Fairmont's Palm Jumeirah Hotel will miss its scheduled completion date later this year as one of its backers, the Kuwaiti firm IFA Hotels & Resorts, struggle to secure funding. As Thomas Storey, the president of the Canada-based Fairmont commented: "The question is ... ultimately will the Palm ever get developed out now the way it was originally envisioned? I think it is a question mark now. "I think it can [make us money]. The issue is [that] we've got to get it built first." Projects closer to completion have fared better. The next big opening is the 396-room five- star hotel at Ibn Battuta Gate in Dubai. Construction is now complete and the property is due to be handed over to owner Seven Tides this week with an anticipated opening by the Swiss hotel group Mövenpick in May .

Oman Air boasts that this coming month it will be the first airline in the world to have full mobile phone and Wi-fi connectivity across its new Airbus A330 fleet. The recent introduction of its A330 aircraft has enabled the airline to increase its fleet from eight to 21, and add five new destinations to its network. However, the jury is still out on the mega $10m (Dh37m) advertising campaign that it launched last month in Asia and Europe. It asks prospective travellers to "Find Oman, Bike Oman, Dive Oman, Climb Oman, Taste Oman, Smell Oman and Walk Oman". Smell Oman? Surely something has been lost in translation.