Cathay Pacific Airways announces improvement plan for blanket incident: recruiting mainland flight attendants and expanding Mandarin service Mandarin | employees | incident
On June 19th, Cathay Pacific CEO Lin Shaobo issued a letter to employees, announcing an improvement plan for the "Carpet Gate" incident, which includes enhancing service culture training, expanding the scope of Mandarin services, and recruiting cabin attendants from mainland China.
Specifically, starting from July, Cathay Pacific will add a customer-oriented service culture training to its cabin crew, with the aim of helping them gain a new understanding of how to provide consistent and thoughtful service to all customers, and consolidating a diverse and inclusive culture. It is reported that the newly added and ongoing service culture training will complement existing training such as onboarding, promotion, and launching new services, requiring the participation of all cabin crew members. Cathay Pacific will further extend the relevant training to other customer service teams.
In response to expanding the scope of Mandarin services, the CEO of Cathay Pacific Airlines also mentioned in a letter to employees that priority will be given to adding Mandarin speaking cabin attendants on flights to and from mainland China, gradually expanding to other flights, and ensuring that every flight to and from mainland China will have Mandarin cabin announcements starting from August. The name tag of the cabin attendant will clearly display the languages in which services can be provided, including Mandarin and other Asian languages. Cabin attendants who can use more than one Asian language can receive a newly added monthly allowance.
In addition, Cathay Pacific plans to start recruiting cabin attendants in mainland China in July, further expanding its Mandarin service team. Cathay Pacific Airways stated that as an international airline based in Hong Kong, the cabin crew of Cathay Pacific Airways will still be mainly composed of employees from Hong Kong, China. At the same time, in accordance with the overall customer needs, recruitment will be conducted from regions outside Hong Kong, China.
On May 23rd, a passenger pointed out on social media that Cathay Pacific discriminates against non English speaking passengers and exposed the recording. The recording shows that the flight attendant said in English, "If you can't speak in English, you can't use a blanket.". Cathay Pacific subsequently apologized multiple times and fired three involved flight attendants.