When people think of British Airways, the faces they see are usually those of our cabin crew. From the warm welcome onboard to a sincere thank you and goodbye at the end of the flight, our cabin crew play a vital role in defining our customers’ experience of British Airways.

So it’s no surprise that the largest single department in British Airways is Inflight Customer Experience (IFCE). It’s home not only to our cabin crew teams but also a number of key teams who work with the cabin crew in the delivery of our world famous onboard customer service. These include:

• IFCE safety and security
  – our number one priority is safety and security and this team are the guardians of making sure it stays that way.

• IFCE resource planning
  –making sure we have the right crew, in the right place at the right time is a complex art, combining rosters, schedules and the varied lifestyles of our crew. It needs a specialist team and our resource planning colleagues deliver that every day.

• IFCE duty operations
  – we’re a truly global, 24 hours-a-day operation running every day of the year. And the IFCE duty operations team is responsible for making sure that we stay running smoothly.

• IFCE transformational change
  – never standing still is our watchword, in order to stay competitive we need to innovate and this team translates bold new ideas into practice for our crew to deliver onboard.

• IFCE fleet management
  – our ground and air management teams work together to support the performance and development of our people in IFCE.

We currently have four cabin crew fleets – three of which are based at our global hub, Heathrow – Worldwide, Eurofleet and Mixed Fleet – while the fourth is based at Gatwick airport. They travel the world on one of the most extensive route networks of any airline, including domestic destinations in the UK, European shorthaul flights and intercontinental longhaul.

In addition, we have International Cabin Crew based at strategic overseas locations such as Buenos Aires, Delhi and Bahrain. The aim here is to provide customers travelling these routes with local crew who have first hand knowledge of their language and culture.

It might be a short flight or a 13 hour leg to one of our worldwide destinations but one thing’s for certain. The IFCE team on the ground and in the air will have been working together to make the inflight customer experience one to truly remember.