Philippine Airlines

It's a basic part of customer service to try and treat customers as individuals and no one is asking them to be over friendly but in my time I have come across some real pains.

don't know why it is, but on American airlines, United, Delta etc I have noticed the cabin crew do tend to be kind of grouchy which is noticeable because you don't get that with other kinds of services in the US where the waiters in restaurants, etc are not like that at all. It's only on airlines.

but every other airline ,the cabin crews are kind of interchangeable, there's just no difference between them once you see past the kind of different silly different coloured clothing they might wear. They should be like these, not over-friendly, but non-hostile prison officers more than effusive interlocuters, their role is very elemental, they are there to ensure you don't starve to death and don't die in some unfortunate accident, not to engage you in a conversation with you about the relative merits of Proust or EM Forster.

#39 ... from your earlier post... "Delta packs you like sardines now and the flight attendants at PAL were friendlier and more attentive. PAL have .... the in flight entertainment system"... Yes an excellent, non emotional and unbiased assessment of how a PAL cabin crew are likely to react in an emergency... " You'll be telling us next that average age, FAA mandated training, experience and salary have nothing to do with effective emergency response between airlines such as Delta and PAL. Spare us...

In many hundreds of flights with Asian airlines over the years (including PAL) I've seen their own safety rules violated, poor attitudes from supervisors who should know better and cabin crews not even in control of their passengers. This does not bode well for their ability to act correctly in the event of an emergency. The same attitudes do not generally exist in airlines such as Qantas, Cathay, ANA, KLM, United, Lufthansa, BA and many others - or Delta. Cos if they did the cabin crew would be fired...

I once landed in Singapore on PAL and as the aircraft was taxi-ing to the gate, stopping several hundred yards away for some reason, and with the seat belt signs still illuminated dozens of passengers with their baggage proceeded to crowd the aisles intent on somehow getting off.... not sure how... Guess what the cabin crew did? Nothing... not a thing... Nor did the captain even bother to explain the reason for the 10 minute delay or instruct passengers to take their seats. But the flight was over an hour late getting in so I guess the passengers had pretty much seen enough... This nonsense is not unique to PAL, but I've seen enough to have an insight into how different airlines rank safety. Of course it's Number 1?.. Nonsense.

As I said to the OP, PAL are OK, nothing special. On a good day I'd rate them average, on a bad day, as poor as it can get... They were banned from flying to Europe for several years, not sure why, but I'm happy they've resumed that service and hope they can expand further. They were a better airline 30 years ago. They went through a dreadful patch in the 90's and are genuinely trying hard to match their neighbours in Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand but have a long way to go. Budget carriers such as Cebu Pacific and Air Asia have taken away a huge chunk of PAL's potential customer base short haul and the Gulf carriers are screwing them on long haul routes. Given the enormous growth in passenger numbers to and from the Philippines over the past 30 years, 12 million OFW's for a start, PAL should have a larger percentage of the MNL passenger and freight traffic. The reason they don't is that they're not very well run - and other airlines are.

Disagree. I have had some truly outstanding crews, many excellent and very now and then downright poor

They don't have to be anything other than competent. They are not there to perform a song-and-dance, do a variety performance or provide witty repartee. I couldn't even care less what they look or dress like. They are there to serve the food and drinks and to be on the ball in the unlikely event anything goes wrong.

#43.. Hey callippo, maybe they could just use robots... put 'em on a rail and just scoot up and down the aisle... fasten your seat belt, chicken or beef, tea, coffee, duty-free?, Yes we take all major credit cards... they could sling passengers out in an emergency.. I'm sure Ryanair will have looked at it in detail and decided the fuel penalty for the extra weight of the rail and would make it less cost effective... and also Ryanair cabin crew gotta be cheaper than robots.. gotta be...

They've replaced check-in with machines. They WANT to replace pilots with computers who don't have a bad day, or get drunk, or go on strike, or fly into each other or into mountains... Why not robots in the cabin?... wouldn't be much of a change on some airlines..

Having said that I'm pretty sure some of those Eastern European girls on Emirates are androids.. they all look pretty much the same and have a vocabulary of about 20 words in addition to those listed above.

Thread drift... Interestingly both Boeing and Airbus are looking at future designs with single pilot cockpits - and the only reason they still stick with human pilot is passengers just wouldn't fly in planes flown remotely or with autonomous systems - and they're probably right. If a computer can fly a plane (which they can), then so can a hacker.

they ARE pretty robotic and interchangeable. There was just no difference between the Cathay Pacific crew I had this year compared to the Air France/China Southern I had last year or the Etihad one the year before that. I fail to see exactly what they are supposed to make them seem 'outstanding'. I suppose they might come into their own if somebody has a heart attack or there's a shoe or underpants bomber on board or something, but so far apart from a single emergency landing that happened 30 years ago in New York when I was like 15 and can't remember very well, nothing like that has ever happened to me on any flight I've been on.

How 'friendly' the crew are comes very,very low on my list of priorities for choosing a flight or airline....otherwise I wouldn't fly very often on Ryanair or other budget airlines here in Europe,for example.

Still,everyone has their priorities.

Some people seem very worried about 'safety'.I take the view that all airlines are theoretically safe (or they wouldn't get permission to fly)and if something does goes wrong..that is fate.So that plays no part in the airline I choose at all.

#45 You're right there... in the shoe bomber incident were it not for the courage and quick wits of cabin crew and passengers, that American Airlines flight would have gone down mid Atlantic, with little chance of anyone knowing why... Given the extreme fears around terrorism at the time, there's every liklihood that AA would have gone bust within a month... BIG tick in the box for that cabin crew.

30 or 40 years ago cabin crew was a plumb job - pretty good money and benefits. But flying was expensive then, and airline employees were generally paid well - but there were a lot fewer planes... Now flying's cheap - and the customers want it cheaper. Today we can fly from Europe to SE Asia in Economy for less than the ticket price in 1980 - and if you shop around, as you do callippo - a LOT less... respect... Safety, reliability, frequency of flights etc., all have improved but the relentless drive on costs and the race to the bottom means that we don't have the best airlines - we have the airlines we deserve and the best airlines we're prepared to pay for.

Personally I like it that way. I travel a lot and I've better things to spend my wedge on than expensive airline tickets. I don't mind mediocre airlines with basic service as long as they're safe and reliable. I'd be prepared to pay more for MORE safe and MORE reliable and probably more for better paid staff... but not any more for food that you wouldn't consider eating at home or in a restaurant or movies that you've seen already or bars at the back. I would pay more for Airports that didn't treat people like cattle but I'm not really convinced they'd spend the money on passenger comfort - just more shopping malls with a few planes parked out the back.

safety on flights : I wish I could remember that flight 30 years ago better and how the cabin crew responded, but it was clearly a dangerous situation. We'd taken off from Logan and shortly afterwards the pilot announced that there was something wrong with the landing gear and we were going to have to fly around in circles for a few hours above the Atlantic before doing an emergency landing at JFK. Kind of exiting for a 15 year old kid I suppose, but some people in the cabin were really upset. When the landing happened we were all in the crash position of course and they were dozens of people sobbing in fear. Obviously we made it, but they looked after us much worse than they probably would have done today. We were kept just in a room at the airport for hours and hours with no food until a replacement flight was arranged. I think these days we would have been packed off to a hotel. For some people it was probably quite a traumatic experience.

Lao Aviation, which was what they were called before they renamed Lao Airlines was genuinely scary. Luckily it was all over in about 30 minutes and I wasn't dead.

once I was on a charter from Tel Aviv to London that had been taken over by a bunch of Orthodox going to some convention or other, it was totally hectic with zillions of kids running around in the the aisles playing tag. Ridiculous. I went to the back and said to the secular Israeli stewardess you shouldn't allow that it's dangerous three of those kids could try one of the doors for a joke, and none of the adults would do anything. They'd just laugh too. She just shrugged her shoulders in resignation and said there's nothing you can say to them.

Saw exactly the same thing on Emirates once - the Arab husbands and multiple wives in First and Business.. dozens of their sprogs dumped in Economy clutching their new I pads from MBK in Bangkok... Totally unsupervised - and total mayhem. If an adult did half of what these kids were up to on a plane the police would be waiting for them in Dubai...

I asked one of the cabin crew if this was common? "Pretty much, and there's little we can do about given the amount of money these people are spending..." I suggested picking out one of them and giving them a good stiff belt round the ear. There would be NO more disruption, they'd be quiet as mice and before landing in Dubai they'd all be running around helping the cabin crew collect the earphones 'n blankets... I think she agreed, but couldn't possibly say so...