Originally Posted by
feederflight
pretty lazy crews who were borderline ok on one flight, but a disaster on the other. On the 2nd flight, the purser was hiding behind a face mask (as the only crew member), just mumbling barely understandable things over the PA, never bothered to even exchange a single word with any pax in the J cabin, genuine impression was that the aeroplane was the last place he wanted to be and meanwhile counting hours until retirement -> imho he should retire better sooner than later since he wasn't exactly doing AC a favour with his attitude
There has been a pretty sizable amount of turnover in the last few years... a lot of the old FA staff are out of the industry entirely at this point. Air Canada isn't alone in this by any means, but it definitely shows in various crew quality issues.
That said, there is definitely a wide variance in FA quality. In one recent flight we had a Quebec-based crew who were clearly more interested in entertaining eachother in speedy French, than they were in communicating in English with the passengers. The flight didn't go through Quebec at all so the number of actual French passengers was probably low. They were all pretty young.
In another recent flight, I had multiple 60+ second friendly conversations with multiple FA staff. They were good at "working the room" and even if you didn't interact with them directly, you felt good because they set a positive tone in the cabin.
IMO this is reflective of Canadian service industry quality as a whole.... we aren't consistently good at it. it's not in our national character.