Originally Posted by
Transpacificflyer
BKK was out of YVR. maybe they have 1 or 2 who can speak French. When I go through Incheon, I fly via YYZ. Almost always a good French language capability for the flights to Korea. I really like the NRT -YUL route, in large part because I can avoid the madness that is YYZ. And now thinking about it, it may be because on the NRT-YUL route the crew is mostly Montreal based, so they do the Bonjour/Hello greeting and I almost always answer in French since I work in both languages and instinctively answer in what ever language I am first addressed in.
Based on my observation, YUL based crew do tend to use French by default, unless one “clearly doesn’t look like Francophone”. It totally makes sense that their preferred language is French even though they can speak very good English.
This reminds me of how VIA Rail handles it on trains leaving from Montreal/Quebec. When the train is within the province of Quebec, announcements are made with French followed by English, but when the train is in Ontario/New Brunswick/Nova Scotia, it’s English followed by French. In business class and sleeper class crew members can usually correctly figure out everyone’s preferred language based on the name in manifest.