Is British Airways' Christmas Gift to Everyone Flight Attendants Who Actually Smile?

December 28, 2011 at 3:35 PM | by juliab | Comments (4)

Oh hai Christmas flight attendants, you look fun! You also look like you're in the wrong uniform. That nail varnish, lipstick, smiley faces, santa hats indicative of a fun disposition...you belong on Virgin Atlantic, right?

Wrong, because, and you may need to sit down for this, we snapped this on our Christmas Eve flight from London-Heathrow to Las Vegas on British Airways. Yes, BA of the grouchy staff who fling inedible food at you and snap if you dare to ask for so much as an extra glass of water. But these British Airways FAs were different—oh so different. In fact, they were the highlight of the flight.

From left to right, Paula, Charlotte, Hannah, Becky and Emily turned the flight from 11 hours of boredom into something way more fun. They joked with us. They wore santa hats. They delivered us Christmas dinner and mince pies. They gave us double rations of alcohol without us even asking. And they told us how they'd all chosen to work the Vegas flight on Christmas Eve, were all friends, and were going out for some FA bonding that night to the Bellagio.

Even the pilot got in on the act, telling us to look for Santa in the sky, apologising for the heavy air traffic due to reindeers, and asking "Santa's little helpers" to stick the doors to manual. Amazing.

We repeat, these ladies are from British Airways. Apparently they're part of a new fleet working a select number of sexy routes that, we couldn't help but note, just so happen to coincide with Virgin's routes: Vegas, LA, Chicago etc.

Is BA finally giving itself a shake and employing personable people who understand that the odd smile from a FA is always a heartwarmer? If it is, it'd be one of the best Christmas presents we could have. Let's cross our fingers; we can't wait to see what they do for our return flight on New Year's Eve...

[Photo: Juliab]

Comments (4)

Return to » Is British Airways' Christmas Gift to Everyone Flight Attendants Who Actually Smile?

I've always found BA flight attendants charming !

Your positive comments are well deserved by these lovely crewmembers from BA's new fleet. They have been employed on, and accepted, working and pay agreements which are much inferior to those enjoyed by their predecessors. I fear that many of those smiles will disappear, though, if they find that they are joined shortly by another group of staff on better pay and conditions following the BA/IAG purchase of UK airline BMI.

I've flown on this new fleet and the writer of this article is absolutely right. Imagine, happy fresh faced crew on London to Manchester flight first thing in the morning?! I recently flew to Phoenix and had the same experience - service with a smile that was most definitely missing before. Doubt very much that BMI crew joining would cause upset. Anyway I doubt they'll be joining at all. Earlier this year a number of papers reported BA as saying they were halving recruitment due to APD increase etc.. there'll be payouts but no guaranteed jobs! http://www.metro.co.uk/news/884077-british-airways-puts-off-400-jobs-to-pay-for-passenger-tax IAG dont want the loss making airline, no one does, they want the slots at LHR!

Hopefully the BMI crew will only have a positive effect - I've only flown BMI a few times, but was very, very happy each time. In fact, I was gutted to hear they'd be combining with BA because BA seems/seemed to rinse every last happy out of its every worker. Hopefully this is a sign that things are on the up though!

Jaunted

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