Drive to hire more mainland Chinese crew could help Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific compete for country’s growing travel market, analysts say
- Move announced by airline CEO in internal memo seen by Post, with other measures including allowance for staff who are proficient in more than one Asian language
- City’s flag carrier has been plagued by recent discrimination fiasco in which its flight attendants were accused of mocking a passenger’s English-speaking abilities
Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways will recruit cabin crew from mainland China from July and boost the number of Mandarin-speaking flight attendants, a move that analysts have said will help it compete in the growing market across the border.
CEO Ronald Lam Siu-por, in an internal memo on Monday obtained by the Post, stipulated a raft of measures to ease the fallout that led to the firing of three cabin crew members after they were accused of mocking the English-language proficiency of a mainlander.
“With the growing number of Putonghua-speaking customers, it has always been our intention to recruit a proportion of cabin crew from the Chinese Mainland after the pandemic,” he said.
The recruitment drive on the mainland will start next month. It is currently unclear how many new employees the airline intends to hire under the move.
While Lam said Cathay would still largely recruit its cabin crew from Hong Kong, he added that the airline would be “augmented by crew from outside of Hong Kong, recruited in line with our overall customer profile”.
As part of the policy, the carrier will begin gradually increasing the number of Mandarin-speaking crew on flights to and from the mainland, before moving on to all international routes.
Lam, who has set up and led a cross-departmental task force to look into service quality following the saga, said: “This will help ensure that every Chinese mainland flight will have consistent Putonghua in-flight announcements from August.”
