Hayley brings British Airways to UCLan! ✈

Hayley Bartholomew

Guest Lecture | UCLan Alumni

Hayley Bartholomew, an International Tourism Management graduate (2012) from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), currently the Change and Development Executive for In-flight Customer Experience at British Airways came to meet with our students as a guest lecturer earlier this month to talk about her career success since graduation and also the importance of managing service quality within such a competitive industry. 

Dr. Carley Sutton, Course Leader for International Tourism Management and researcher in service quality management, expressed the importance of meeting with industry professionals and it is especially great for the students to hear from UCLan Alumni such as Hayley. 

Hayley - who spent 12 months working at Walt Disney World, Orlando for her placement year - took the plunge and moved to London after securing a role as cabin crew with British Airways. Following a year flying she secured a place on the 18-month Business Experience Programme at British Airways where she was placed in the Product and Service department. Hayley managed to secure a permanent role after her extensive Business Programme and expressed that it was down to hard work and determination. 

The job really threw Hayley into the deep end, giving her the chance to work on projects such as the launch of the B787-9 aircraft into service and developing the recruitment strategy for Mixed Fleet Cabin Crew. 

More recently, Hayley advised that she has been working on the investment in British Airways business class cabin 'Club World'. As part of the Club World product and service development, Hayley advised they worked closely with catering company Do & Co and high end retailer The White Company.

Hayley's role within the project was to ensure the new service could be delivered on a number of different long-haul aircraft and to support development of the two day cabin crew training course. In addition to this, she worked on developing an intranet page to support cabin crew, producing service videos, standards booklets and multiple service reference documents to ensure the service embedded consistently. Hayley stated there was a commitment to constantly review the service and innovate in line with customer demand.

The students listened intently and were eager to find out what sets British Airways a part from their competition, and how Hayley helped shape service aboard Club World. The students, in a group exercise, were tasked to share how they would manage colleague engagement with a remote based employee network, and determine how they would maintain quality service standards with a wide variety of obstacles in their way.