Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. will recruit more cabin crew from mainland China and widen the use of Mandarin language on flights, its chief executive officer said Monday, less than a month after the carrier fired three flight attendants for disparaging passengers who didn’t speak English.
“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,” CEO Ronald Lam said in a note to staff seen by Bloomberg News. “We plan to start the recruitment process of cabin crew in the Chinese mainland from July.”
Hong Kong authorities and Chinese state media were highly critical of the airline following the incident involving the three cabin crew on a flight from Chengdu in May, when a passenger recorded one of them saying that if people couldn’t say “blanket” in English they shouldn’t be able to have one.
Cathay’s majority shareholder is the Asian arm of British conglomerate Swire Pacific Ltd. with a 45% stake. Air China Ltd. holds 29.9%.
Last week, Cathay announced changes to pay for cabin crew among other shifts, including adjustments to its salary policy for pilots.
The airline’s workforce has shrunk by around 40% since 2019. It used to employ about 13,000 cabin crew, including at erstwhile subsidiary Cathay Dragon. Cathay is still rebuilding from the pandemic and doesn’t expect to return to pre-Covid passenger capacity until the end of next year.
“Our cabin crew community will remain predominantly Hong Kong employees, augmented by crew from outside of Hong Kong recruited in line with our overall customer profile,” Lam said.
Additional training for cabin crew will also start next month. “This aims to refresh our crew with the approach and skills necessary to provide our caring service consistently to all customers,” Lam said.
Cathay shares were up 1.6% as of 11:13 a.m. in Hong Kong.