Airline crews given tablets to learn VIP flyers' details

London British Airways flight attendant Daljit Kaur used to sift through five pages of printouts before takeoff to memorise details of key customers. Now a flick of her finger brings their names and foibles immediately to hand. Kaur, a 28-year BA veteran, is one of 1,200 crew issued with Apple iPads in a bid to lift service standards. Data is loaded 24 hours before a flight and updated until departure, with the tablet small enough to be used discreetly in the cabin. "I'm ahead of myself in knowing where our corporate and high-value customers are sitting, and who needs help," Kaur, a cabin-service director, BA's highest rank of flight attendant, said in London following a flight from Istanbul. "They look at you and say ‘Have you been on a special course?'" Carriers are intensifying competition for premium clients as the economic slump hits travel budgets, with Virgin Atlantic Airways spending £100 million (Dh579.35 million) on frills including a cheese trolley and afternoon tea and Deutsche Lufthansa adding flat-bed seats that offer 8 per cent more space. Industry earnings fell 55 per cent last quarter and will slump by $1.4 billion (Dh5.14 billion) to $3.5 billion this year, the International Air Transport Association estimates. British Airways, the market leader on the most lucrative premium route between Europe and North America, became the first carrier to equip crews with iPads when it began issuing them in November after a three-month trial, and aims to distribute as many as 2,000 to senior staff over coming months. While the unit of International Consolidated Airlines Group, Europe's third-biggest carrier, declined to say how much it will spend, that number of devices would cost just short of £1 million at current Apple iStore prices. The iPad 2s supply seating plans and passenger profiles, helping to identify BA's gold and black loyalty-card holders, its most frequent and highly valued flyers, so that Kaur and her colleagues can greet them personally as they board. Information available includes journey details, special meal requests and specific medical needs, and flight attendants are also authorised to use the tablets to submit customer complaints, speeding up response times, British Airways said. "The crew does it so that passengers don't have to run around on holiday trying to do it themselves," said Pippa Grech, who manages the iPad programme. "Otherwise, by the time they get off the plane, they think, ‘Oh, I won't bother about it.'" The initiative has produced a "positive response," she said. While British Airways is so far unique in handing iPads to cabin crew after Apple's introduction of the touch-screen tablet created the computer industry's fastest-growing segment in 2010, other carriers have experimented with more basic platforms. Emirates, the largest international airline and one of a number of fast-expanding Gulf carriers that's squeezing BA, has provided crews with passenger details via its "knowledge-driven in-flight service," or KIS, for more than five years. The company's pursers are issued with Thinkpad laptops that convert into tablets operated with a stylus. AMR's American Airlines, BA's US ally, became first to issue the devices to pilots as Electronic Flight Bags, replacing paper manuals and navigational charts formerly held in a carry-on kit bag weighing 18.14 kilograms. The switch won Federal Aviation Administration approval in December after months of tests and is being applied across the Boeing 777 fleet. Other tablets may be used, should they get FAA backing, AMR said. The Fort Worth, Texas-based company, currently in bankruptcy protection, is also replacing the personal in-flight entertainment systems in the premium cabins of its 767 planes with 6,000 Samsung Galaxy tablets. Qantas Airways, Australia's No 1 airline, said in February that a single 767 is testing a system that streams online content to iPads handed to passengers, who will be able to view films and media from their own devices as the trial progresses. The use of iPads and other tablets is likely to proliferate as on-board Wi-Fi becomes more common, said Kevin O'Sullivan, lead engineer at the research lab of Sita, the top provider of information technology and telecommunication services to airlines. BA currently requires crews to download data before they board, and to send fresh information once they disembark. "With Wi-Fi you can start to do really interesting things," O'Sullivan said. "If a flight is delayed, you can consider who has a connecting flight and, if you are running out of time, you may need to reorganise them," he said Still, carriers must judge how much information they can collect without provoking a backlash over their probing of people's travel and spending patterns, said Andrew Curry, a director of The Futures Company, a technology consultancy. "It can go a stage too far," Curry said. "You start to think: ‘These people don't really know me; they just have a data profile.' And there's also a point at which we start to find people having a lot of knowledge about us slightly spooky." From gulfnews