News and notes from around the interweb:
- Canada’s WestJet is being taken private
- Emirates flight attendants being told not to ignore passengers who ring their call bell
Feedback from our customers in the last 4 months has highlighted that cabin monitoring is not being done as it should be. Cabins are being left unattended and call bells are not being answered immediately or at all.
The airline, whose profits are down 69% year-over-year, will not be distributing profit sharing to employees.
- Celebrities going off on airlines
- NRA head’s travel and other expenses leaked (WSJ) What’s getting attention is $39,000 in clothes in a single day and $18,300 for a car and driver in Europe. However I’m impressed by $200,000 in air travel in a month (not tough to do if you’re flying private I suppose) and $1,096 for “Frankfurt Airport Assistance” which if it involved a tarmac transfer is actually not a bad price.
Apparently Oliver North’s departure from the organization was linked to these expenses, and pressuring Wayne LaPierre to leave over them. I’d add that — not noted in the Journal piece – billing a company’s marketing firm, which then bills the company, is a strategy I’ve seen used to avoid scrutiny over expenses (and to expense things that wouldn’t be in-policy).
- The percentage of foreign ownership in Air Canada will be allowed to rise from 25% to 49%.
- Heartwarming story of a deaf stand up comedian and a United flight attendant who knows sign language.
- Heh.
Call buttons: if airlines want call buttons answered, they will develop metrics to determine how often they are activated and which flight attendants are responsive to them.
Non responsive flight attendants will either get promoted or reassigned depending on if the airline wants their crew responding to calls or not. I am serious… some airlines do not want crew to coddle all of the customers.
Personally, I never use the call button, unless I need to know what time the plane will land as if I am an actor stating his line in an airplane scene.