Over 100 flight attendants from mainland China have joined Cathay Pacific’s cabin crew, as the Hong Kong airline steps up hiring across the border.
Cathay Pacific’s director of service delivery Mandy Ng told media outlets on Monday that the carrier plans to hold more recruitment fairs in mainland China with the aim of hiring a total of 1,500 mainland Chinese flight attendants by 2025. The figure would make up 15 per cent of the cabin crew.
Ng said English was the airline’s main training language, and just like for flight attendants hired from Hong Kong, Cantonese proficiency was not a requirement. According to Cathay’s job description for prospective Hong Kong-based cabin crew, applicants must be proficient in English and one Asian language such as Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese.
For the recruitment scheme targeting candidates from mainland China, those who speak a third language will be prioritised, according to the job description.
The executive added that Cathay will make sure there are flight attendants speaking English, Mandarin and Cantonese on any given flight to serve passengers, Ng said.
The carrier began recruiting in mainland China for the first time last August since its founding in 1946, following accusations over alleged discrimination against non-English speaking passengers.
The accusations came after some flight attendants were heard making fun of a passenger who used the English word “carpet” while asking for a blanket during a flight from Chengdu to Hong Kong in late May. The incident was captured in recording that went viral on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu.
The carrier apologised on Weibo, also a Chinese social media platform, and fired three flight attendants days after the incident.
A Cathay Pacific flight attendant union said at the time that the company needed to address its staff shortage issue and boost staff morale, to which Ng said then that the union did not represent the company.
Hong Kong’s prolonged pandemic measures dealt a heavy blow to Cathay Pacific, which slashed its workforce as it grounded a significant portion of its passenger fleet. The carrier fired some 2,000 cabin crew members in October 2020 during and reduced their remuneration permanently.
Per its 2023 interim report released in August, around 60 per cent of the group’s revenue came from the mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan markets.
Language skills
According to the airline, new cabin crew members – regardless of where they were from – undergo seven weeks of training covering service skills, safety and handling emergency scenarios.
Among Cathay Pacific’s newly hired flight attendants was Harry Wu from the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, who said he was a frequent passenger of Cathay Pacific when studying abroad.
He told reporters on Monday that he considered the incident last May an “anomaly”. He added that Cathay Pacific’s training had been very thorough and that cabin crew were taught to offer the same treatment to passengers regardless of the language they spoke.
While on his first flight as a Cathay Pacific flight attendant – bound for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – last week, Wu said there was a passenger asking for a blanket in Cantonese, which he failed to understand initially because the pronunciation sounded like “towel” in Mandarin. The flight attendant said he would work hard to learn Cantonese.
The Hong Kong carrier has found itself in the spotlight in recent weeks after announcing it would cut a dozen flights daily until the end of February to avoid last-minute cancellations over the Lunar New Year travel period.
The move came after the airline axed dozens of flights on the last three days of December and New Year’s Day, citing “higher than anticipated pilot absence caused by seasonal illness.” The cancellations affected flights between Hong Kong and Japan, mainland China, Singapore, Australia, and South Korea, among other destinations. A pilot union, however, attributed the flight cancellation to a shortage of pilots.
Corrections:
17/1/2024 at 12.50pm: An earlier version of this article said the alleged discrimination incident on the Cathay Pacific flight in May 2023 was captured in a video. The incident was captured not in a video, but an audio recording. We regret the error.
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