Originally Posted by
hikouki
I haven't flown CX in ages, but I used to fly LAX-HKG 2-3x per year from 2015-2017. I always flew Business as an upgrade from PEY. Looking back, I think I do notice some difference in the crews. HKG based were more attentive and less transactional.
At this day and age, what is the main benefit to CX of having overseas-based crews? I am pretty sure in the old days it was pretty common as CX hired FAs from 10 or 12 nations? I noticed on my flights that the Philippine, Thai and Singaporean crews were usually pursers and up, but none were junior crew. Does CX still hire foreign crews from around Asia?
yea these are mostly different things, you're a bit confused. The overseas bases are not about hiring crew from those places for diversity sake, they are for cost measures. True the bases are all citizens from those places but the outport bases are all very small relative to HK. I don't know what thread it is but I walked through the logic recently.
Most of the non-HK nationality crew are actually based in Hong Kong. They are recruited from around Asia and given various incentives to move to Hong Kong and work for CX here. Yes, there were bases elsewhere in Asia but a ton of Korean, Japanese, Thai, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, and some Indian FAs are all part of the Hong Kong base.
The logic behind recruiting around Asia is CX is an intl airline and flies to a lot of destinations where many languages are spoken, especially with a lot of flights in Asia. And since CX cannot hire mainland Chinese staff (although some are seconded through Air China, and obvious KA has some but they don't fly CX), the Taiwanese crew are CX's native Mandarin speakers. Mainlanders were, until recently a big % of CX's total traffic everywhere not just on China flights. Japanese speakers for Japan flights Korean speakers for Korean flights. Etc. etc. Definitely a nice touch for CX to have all the nationalities on board. They still do recruit regionally and bring people to HK to work, although who knows what will happen after coronavirus.
Originally Posted by
ernestnywang
I believe the HK base has some non-HKers (e. g., Taiwanese), so there are more nationalities than crew bases.
yes, this. although your modesty is understating it a lot...the majority of the non-HK crew are still based in HK! The outport crew as a % of total is not big, and shrinking still. The main point is outport crew have nothing to do with having diversity, as I think the other poster was referring to. The crew for diversity purposes are all based in HK. The outport crews are all hired mostly for cost measures.