DEL flights to served by India-based cabin crew
 

Not sure if this has been discussed in some other thread already, but the purser on my HEL-DEL yesterday told me that DEL will be served by India-based cabin crews starting November. She was clearly not happy with the fact that this was her last Delhi run.

Did She mention how many colleagues are happy they dont need to go DEL in the future? :)

Whoever is responsible for these local crews steps sees just cost and ignores identity. It is also apparent that they fail in proper training of "own" crews, so expecting the "external" team to be trained properly is close to naive. Using a couple of crew members from destination to support pax is good. Building the whole team of destination cabin crews will soon make AY a mispositioned wanna-be-Nordic company. The subpar service already shows on SIN, HKG and BKK services (and BKK is not even turned into full Thai team). Does anybody believe the DEL crew will beat it...

This is so spot on.
You can all the "customer experience managers" and/or "inflight service developer" you want. Without a well trained and motivated crew it is just something that looks good in the investor reports.

Add Norra cabin crew there.

Nuff said.
my recent experiences on all these asian destinations are just hearing your words.
None of them have honored the otherwise great service culture of these.

As I see this, it's all related to the demise of Finnish language on board AY flights. Nowadays you hear very seldom anything in Finnish on AY flights by the crews, even on domestic legs the safety demos are done in English only. Yesterday I flew two legs with SAS and Swedish seemed to be the number one language in all PA's. As I've written in this and other forums before, it makes me really sad, that AY (and apparently their Finnish FF clientele, based on the feedback I received) doesn't care about the Finnish language anymore. I know Finnish is a small, oddball language, but so is Icelandic, and if you've flown Icelandair, you know that they are proud of their language and heritage. As Finnish language seems to be irrelevant to AY and it's clients, why would they pay extra for Finnish speaking crew if they can get the Indian crews do the same with a fraction of the cost? You really can't have the cake and eat it too.

Maybe sticking my head out here, but..
That language demise started a long time ago, when that other official language of Finland was removed. No one cared back then either.

On DEL-HEL yesterday, the other official language was Spanish. I was surprised and later learned that there was a big Spanish group on this flight.

First of all, I'm not a friend of outsourcing. It hardly ever makes anything better, and I consider this bad news.

Secondly, I find it a shame that AY doesn't put their outsourced foreign FAs on a language course. They don't need to be able to enter a complicated discussion, but basic greetings and service "leipää? vettä?" shouldn't be too hard. Imagine a Lufthansa FA who doesn't speak German, not even mentioning Air France...

But on the other hand, I wouldn't necessarily blame the outsourced crew for bad service. I'll get some experience from the HKG route next week, but for the SIN route, I can't blame the crew for being less attentive or less polite than a regular Finnish AY crew. I've had good experiences with them, and it's not their fault they're there, of course.

I'm sure most FAs are happy about the DEL route being outsourced. When the longhaul outsourcing started, cabin crew expressed it as their wish that DEL would be the first route. It remains to be seen whether we as customers can be happy and whether AY can maintain the same level of service with an Indian crew. I'm sure this will make the atmosphere of a Delhi Deli different from before. :(

One of the things I really enjoy after returning from a trip is that first feeling of stepping into a Finnair plane and feeling a little like I am already back home or at least on my way there. Hard to keep that atmosphere when you can’t even speak in Finnish to anyone serving you and the level of service is horribly inconsistent. The inconsistency I suspect is probably related to higher turnover of crew members but it could also be the way staff are trained.

I just stepped off a HKG flight, and have flown both SIN/HKG a handful of times in the past month. Very crew dependent indeed. E.g. the SIN service sucked, very slow, no clue, whereas HKG has been all over the place, some borderline bad, some quite indifferent, but on the one I just took the crew was brilliant.

I do think a lot of it is a training issue. I have a couple of friends on the HKG crew whom I talk to outside of the aircraft too, and I've heard that the initial training they get is pretty much just safety, no customer service or service flow whatsoever. One friend started quite recently, and mentioned that it was a pure watch and learn experience for him: "you'll figure it out". I mean sure they probably got some dusty manuals somewhere that they have access to, but that's no way of training customer service.

I'm not sure if they start to train those things after a while (I think the purser's at least go through something eventually), but pair the lack of initial CS training with a high turnover and a lot of new faces (AY101/102 went daily not too long ago), I think you'll end up with something that accounts to a lot of the stuff reported here.

Definitely a sad trend, as to me one of the cool things about AY have always been the Finnish speaking crews. Used to live in YYZ for 12 years and would fly back home to visit with AY quite often. Boarding the plane made you feel closer to home already.
But nostalgic thoughts aside, I have noticed a lot of foreign crews on different routes especially during the last year, from HKG to BUD to LED to VNO, etc, etc.. And sorry... it really sucks!
The foreign crews could be trained to perfection (giving the benefit of the doubt here) - but part of AY identity will be lost forever.

Norwegian tried to put Thai based crew on all their longhaul flights and failed with EU and US labor law, so they opened a crew base in FLL. Probably AY will do the same for its west bound flights too. Flight and cabin crew wages are a big proportion of operating cost, so they have start somewhere to (continue to) survive.

That said this might be an indicator that margins to Delhi are not rosy anymore but the fact they are setting up a base in DEL indicates that they plan to stay for a while.

I have experienced similar spanish speaking subset of the crew on the HKG route and that was the low point of all Finnair flights up to know. I agree with the others, the main problems are the insufficient training, lack of any identity to the airline and the personnel not understanding the product. What is even more strange, the ever increasing personnel not speaking the nordic languages on the short haul flights suffers from the same problem.