Hacker News Reader

Comment by openplatypus | Hacker News Reader

This some breakthrough in corporate communication. It feels real. It feels human.

No wishy washy BS.

Emirates is pissed at LHR and they are open about it.

Emirates is less of a corporation and more an organ of the Emirate of Dubai. As such this conflict almost escalated into a diplomatic incident and the UK government hastily made an announcement soon after that they were investigating WTF is going on at Heathrow.

But entirely managed by Brits. Nothing gets quite as scathing as an upper-middle class Brit letting it rip.

You can only do this when you're really pissed and you no longer care about working cooperatively with your counterparties, particularly LHR's management team.

Yeah, they specifically imply shareholders should be firing the management

Or more precisely that the government should be firing the Spanish company that owns Heathrow, with a well-deserved reputation for incompetence (they were forced to divest Gatwick and Stansted).

That said, the government is even more incompetent than Heathrow, as shown by the shambles at DVLA or the IR35-linked shortage in HGV haulers, so the incompetence goes well beyond Brexit and it is highly unlikely anyone chosen to replace Heathrow management would be even worse.

It boils down to who they are trying to appease. With the potential backlash they would have got from customers and damage to their brand it makes sense to position themselves as 'taking a stand on behalf of the customer'. If there was more to lose in regards to their relationship with LHR, we'd have seen a wishy washy 'we are sorry, here are some refunds'.

Furthermore, now they are in the position to put in another notice to the effect claiming - Look we tried, we are sorry it didn't work out, here are some refunds

Just came to say the same. It's absolutely refreshing.

It's pretty clear; their partners screwed them and they suffer even when having plenty of advance knowledge of the passenger surge.

It's a little verbose and there's at least 1 typo, but I generally agree.

It feels nice when a corporate statement isn't sugar-coated to the point of being meaningless.

That's because the statement target isn't LHR sharehokders but the public.

If the target were shareholders and management they would've wrote privately.

With this move they are aiming for public pressure on LHR management and other stakeholders.

I appreciate the messaging too. It definitely feels as a person wrote it and not a faceless corporate entity. However, as the self-proclaimed reigning typo champion several years running I will say you'd think a PR person would do a once-over on the text for mistakes before publishing.

It's normal to have typos. Not everyone's first language is English. I'd rather read a statement like this with typos than a typical BS.

This doesn't even have anything to do with the first language. Everyone makes typos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com