Alaska Airlines is offering ice cream and warm cookies on new long-haul flights, but flight attendants say understaffing is making the service unsustainable.
Alaska Airlines offers a lot of service on its new long-haul international flights from Seattle/Tacoma to Europe and Asia, including ice cream and warm cookies service in the economy cabin.
But flight attendants say the airline isn’t staffing the flights with enough workers to provide adequate service in economy, which Alaska refers to as “Main Cabin”. The Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFA-CWA) filed a grievance against the company earlier this month, requesting that Alaska either reduce the amount of onboard service on the company’s long-haul flights, or add more flight attendants.
The union says the company is in violation of its contract, which requires the union and the airline to mutually agree on in-flight service standards.
The complaint refers only to the intercontinental service operated by the Boeing 787-9 aircraft, which are staffed with flight attendants from Alaska’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary. There are around 400 Hawaiian Airlines flight attendants based in Seattle/Tacoma to operate the long-haul international flights marketed under the Alaska Airlines brand.
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Hawaiian’s union contract calls for nine flight attendants to be assigned to long-haul intercontinental flights on the Boeing 787-9, with an additional flight attendant to be added if the anticipated passenger load exceeds 90%.
Josh Aoki, a Hawaiian flight attendant and president of the local chapters in Seattle/Tacoma and Los Angeles, told The Seattle Times that the airline had agreed to a contractually required “monitoring period” for the new service. The union had hoped that after the airline moved one flight attendant from economy to business class, it would make adjustments after seeing the economy onboard service in action, but after the monitoring period ended in May, the airline decided everything was working well and made no adjustments.
Aoki said the flight attendants didn’t object to a premium service in the economy cabin—only the staffing levels. “We are not opposed to doing cookies or ice cream or whatever it is,” Aoki said. “We just need the bodies to do it.”
Aoki also noted that the limited number of flight attendants working in the economy cabin means the service, which includes hot meals, alcoholic beverage sales, ice cream, warm cookies, and status recognition for elite flyers, takes a long time, with one team of flight attendants pushing one cart from the front of the economy cabin all the way to the back, instead of in a zoned approach that is used on other flights. Aoki says this results in long waits for both meals and tray pickups, cutting into passenger sleep time on overnight flights.
The union took a more directly critical tone in a message to flight attendants on its own website: “We take pride in delivering world-class service, but management’s current Boeing 787-9 service model is threatening that legacy. It isn’t just inefficient—it’s an unsustainable pace that undermines the quality our passengers expect and the professional standards our crews deserve.”
“Months [after the observation period ended], management has offered no resolutions to ease the demands of an operation they refuse to resource properly, citing claims of needing more data. Yet, management has repeatedly shown they can react swiftly to passenger feedback—highlighting that changes can be made, but they simply choose not to. Instead, management’s response to Flight Attendants has consistently been: Make it work.”
In a statement to The Seattle Times, Alaska Airlines said its “priority is to support our crews while delivering the safe, consistent and remarkable travel experience our guests expect—and that keeps us competitive in the markets we serve.”
The Alaska Airlines Boeing 787-9 aircraft at the center of the dispute currently fly from Seattle/Tacoma to London, Rome, and Seoul. Earlier this month, Alaska announced it would begin flights to Paris and Athens next year. Other long-haul international flying done by Hawaiian flight attendants onboard the Airbus A330 aircraft offers different service and is not part of the dispute.