How British Airways is dealing with their problems

"When British Airways's Terminal 5 descended into chaos as its public opening,BBC viewers were treated to the sight of BA's exasperated PR Richsrd Goodfellow shutting the door to a staff rest room in the face of pursing journalists after a fraught press briefing in which the dorector of operations, Gareth Kirkwood, refused to take questions." The Guardian, Monday April 7 2008.

"When it is OK for a PR to run away" was the title of the article.

British Airways is a well established airline company and it in some way reprents Britain. Experiencing such situation is a real crisis but that is where public relations has to exerce its power to deal with it and find solutions for both parts.
British airways did apologize and it promised to do its best to solve the problems that situation incurred and to refund all passengers who lost their luggages. However running away and refusing to take questions is the good way of solving those kind of crisis situation.

What BA's PR representatives could have done differently?

.Pretend to need space for new passengers arriving and take the media away from seeing what is really happening

.Move the media(journalists, TV, press etc) into another room in order to stop them from asking questions to passengers and collect more negative opinions.

.Because it was a big opening events they should have restricted t he number of journalists

.Put more focus on the events and have a PR spokeperson ready in case of a crisis.

Have other opinions or others approaches?

Feel free to share them with us!!!