Originally Posted by
Traveloguy
Agreed. London based crew are significantly better than Oz based crew than the old battleaxes who crew ex-Australia to Asia. My last couple of London crew based flights were even better than anything I would get out of CX and there are many threads on the QF forum discussing the very topic. ex-Australia crew however are very 'hit or miss' and more often than not 'miss'.
I think a large part of it has to do with the fact that out-station crews are always flying the same sectors, so LHR based crews are always flying LHR-BKK/SIN/HKG-LHR and get to see a lot of the same people all of the time. They are home within a few days of leaving, so they are always "refreshed", even on the homeward bound sector. The same goes with JetConnect crew, based in AKL (mostly, although one part of my argument is about to be shot down in flames).
One thing with LH cabin crew is the extraordinarily long time that they are away from home, anything up to 10 days or so, for Australian based crew. LON-based crew do not see this, so they are often far less "jaded" than their AU based colleagues.
You can often see this on Asian based carriers, SQ crew are based in SIN, CX crew are based in HKG, they do a straight out and return journey, away from home for three or four days at a time, no more. Both provide excellent service.
Translate this on to QF or BA, where due to the nature of the routing - two sectors, multiple stopovers, and so on and so forth - is it any wonder that the crew start to become a little bit jaded at the end of their 10 day trip?
Again, this is not meant to be an apologist post, just realistically stating why some people find some crews better than other crews.
Dave