Cabin Service, Quality and Costs. Finnair strikes out into subcontracting territory.

Passengers who contemplate such things will for many years have wondered why legacy airlines have often struggled to achieve in the air the levels of customer service provided by hospitality industries on the ground?Why when customers receive energetic, friendly service in restaurants and cafes from people on minimum wages who are rushed off their feet all day do they get something very different from the much higher paid cabin staff on the "national"/major carriers from the same countries? Why can't we find Mandarin Oriental, Shangri La, or even the local cafe's service when  aloft?

Airline managements have pondered the same thing and asked the same questions. Many, especially among the old legacy operators, pay their cabin crew well,  sometimes extremely so, give them good conditions,put them up in nice hotels with all sorts of generous allowances, look after them in sickness and in health, and listen to and help with their various woes. Yet despite all this all too often the recipients don't return the compliment with outstanding service.

Those involved with industrial relations wonder endlessly how they can avoid interminable hassles with unions over minutiae of terms and conditions. People willingly and enthusiastically sign on to work on aeroplanes. For many it is the ambition of a lifetime. And yet when they get on an aircraft they find unions telling them what they can and can't do and on occasion refusing to allow an inch of flexibility to make a trip successful. As result all the motivational efforts go down the drain and potentially excellent staff find life becomes a drudge. The management challenge is to get everyone into a "Can do" and "Do what it takes" frame of mind and get rid of the constant change averse Somme-like battle over every comma and dot in contracts. Take away the hassles and the savings from reducing the legions of I.R.staff numbers and their accomodation and salaries would be a huge bonus in itself.

The straightforward answer to anyone arriving on the scene with a clean sheet of paper would be to get rid of all these exasperating and immensely time consuming hassles. The ideal would be to have someone else deliver a high quality working cabin service machine machine every morning, take it away every evening, fix any problems out of sight and deliver it back, bright and cheerful, the next morning

Back to the legacy customers. Wouldn't it be nice for them to find the problem solved so that they could sit back, relax.  Then they wouldn't have to migrate to the Gulf or Asian carriers newcomers with their smiling welcomes and unflagging service?

Finnair may just have opened the door to these sorts of things becoming possible. They are starting by subcontracting cabin services on a few short haul routes.  Predictably those who made this necessary by refusing to change are not happy. There have been efforts to crack the problem of  how to provide great, brand compliant service at lower cost before. One successful answer is franchising. It is still in the game but the legacy carriers, often weak in the face of challenges from unions or internal vested interests, have tended to back away from it even when proven to be highly successful. The industry, its managements, shareholders and customers (the people who keep it all afloat/aloft) have a lot to gain by figuring out their own ways of following Finnair's bold, if as yet tentative, initiative.