Had a very nice and long chat with the ISM on a flight this afternoon. (I won't be providing any identifying information which QR could use to identify her in case any of this information was not supposed to be released.) Here's some random information I thought others might find interesting. This is what she told me. Take it for what it's worth.

● There are approximately 13,500 flight attendants (cabin crew). Roughly half are from the Philippines. Other well represented countries in this group include South Korea, Thailand and Eastern Europe. Western countries like Australia, New Zealand, U.K., are not well represented at all. EK, OTOH, has lots of "western" flight attendants. QR is hiring, and the 13,500 number is going up fast, as new destinations continue to be added and QR takes delivery of additional aircraft.

● In her opinion, cabin crew is pretty much a meritocracy. Promotions (from Y) to J or F, or beyond that to training, are based mostly on comments from passengers. Comments from cabin crew supervisors are much less valued because QR cabin crew management is aware (or feels) that there are friendships, and cabin crew managers could be commending/recommending their friends. In this ISM's estimate, each passenger comment is weighted something like 5× a similar comment from in-flight cabin crew management.

● Everyone is unhappy with the number of flights which require bus gates. This should be alleviated when the new terminal is finished. Cabin crew all think that allocating widebodies to bus gates is just plain silly. They should be for 32x aircraft.

● Management takes passenger comments (qatarairways.com/tellus) seriously. One recent visible result is that the same aircraft on the same route doesn't have the same AVOD selection on the outbound and the inbound. People wanted more variety. (But why not have ALL AVOD selections always available??) Also, frequent travelers complained that the selections didn't change often enough.

● There are no regular financial incentives. If the company has a good year, sometimes there will be a small end-of-year bonus for cabin crew. Otherwise, the only way to earn extra money is overtime. I didn't ask about the max number of hours that can be worked in a month.

I'm doing this from memory (obviously I wasn't taking notes during our informal and friendly chat). That's all I can recall right now. If I remember more, I'll add it to the thread.