Look, since this is a frequent Flyer forum, back in the day when I was in IT, I was working on the Y2K remediation project for Ansett.
The three word mantra for the project was "repair, remediate, replace" - repair a system (if you could), remediate any impacts (if you couldn't repair it), replace it if necessary.
One of the systems that I reviewed was the frequent flyer preferences system, and it had to be replaced. Source code had been lost, the vendor had gone out of business, it was going to break, and the issues couldn't be remediated.
I set out the reasons why it needed to be replaced, why it couldn't be repaired or remediated, what the impacts were likely to be, and moved on.
My contract finished. I actually got a call while I was in the delivery suite while Mrs BJReplay was giving birth to our first child from someone wanting to ask me a question about the system. I pretty quickly hung up on them, but a couple of days later called back, and referred them to my report. It pointed out that the system was going to totally fail, and the impacts would hit frequent flyer preferences - which would hit the frequent flyers who used the preference system the most (prefer forward aisle, vegetarian meal) who were most likely to be the most loyal frequent fliers.
When Y2K rolled around, Ansett's most loyal, highest status frequent flyers who never really bothered with choosing where they were seated, because their expectation was that:
- they would walk into the Golden Wing lounge
- they would be greeted by name
- they would be quietly handed a boarding pass for their flight just before the door was about to be closed
- they would be seated in 1A or 1D
discovered that, because the frequent flyer preferences system broke, there was chaos.
Their preferences weren't being applied to bookings because their bookings weren't showing up, because they were sorting into the wrong century - yes, Y2K was real; most systems were fixed.
They'd walk onto the plane having not looked at their boarding pass (and the lounge staff were too sht-scared to tell them about the problem) to discover that they were in 23E, and someone else was in 1A and 1D, and DYKWIA?
Ansett failed for lots of reasons (not least of which was their mixed lolly bag of aircraft types), but one contributing factor was that some of those frequent flyers were CEOs or chairmen of boards, and they pulled their entire companies travel from Ansett and sent it to Qantas.
That's the sort of consequence that shutting down an Australian division of HSBC doesn't seem to have - a company pulling its banking from HSBC, but if the CEO has just had to refinance their home loan because they don't like Pepper, and, having just got through that, discover that the bank is shortchanging them on frequent flyer points, and the CFO says "we're due for our five-year review of banking facilities" the CEO might just say "anyone but HSBC".
. Wasn't going to do that
