Cathay Pacific’s brand sentiments plummet following mass flight cancellations

Cathay Pacific’s brand sentiments have plummeted following the airline's decision to cut more than 80 flights since Christmas Eve and further reduce flights from January to February 2024, to cope with the lack of reserve pilots and flight attendants. 

This comes after Cathay Pacific apologised for cancelling over 80 flights since Christmas Eve, including flights between Hong Kong and countries such as Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne, Dubai, London and Amsterdam. It is cutting around 12 flights a day from January to February over the busy Lunar New Year travel period.

This has caused a dip in Cathay's brand sentiments. Social monitoring firm Meltwater saw over 700 mentions in Hong Kong regarding the incident since 29 December 2023, with 11% positive, 30.5% negative and 58.5 neutral sentiments.

Before Cathay Pacific’s flight cancellations arrangements, its sentiments were 24.1% positive and 8.2% negative. However, since the flight cancellations, negative sentiments surrounding Cathay have increased to 35.2%. Keywords associated with the incident include “cancellations”, "manpower" (人手), "new flight details", "flights to avoid", and "dozen flights".

Meanwhile, media intelligence firm CARMA saw over 1.4k mentions regarding the related arrangements. The brand sentiments revolving around Cathay Pacific have been 5.9% positive and 29.4% negative. Before the cancellations, its brand sentiments were 33.7% positive and 3.5% negative.

In a conversation with MARKETING-INTERCATIVE, Cathay's chief operations and service delivery officer Alex McGowan said over the Christmas and New Year period, Cathay underestimated the number of reserve pilots it would need. Its staff worked round the clock to minimise the impact and in particular he would like to thank the crew operations team, airport team, and pilots for their enormous efforts during this period.

“Given our January pilot rosters were already set in mid-December, the lack of adequate reserve levels persisted into January. In order to stabilise the current operation, we needed to cancel further flights across the first two weeks of January. Cancellations peaked at 27 flights (or 14 flight pairs) on 7 January and will be fewer over subsequent weeks.  We particularly regret the need to cancel a number of these flights at short notice. We understand this is extremely troublesome for our customers and are very sorry for the inconvenience caused," He added.

In order to ensure no last-minute disruptions will occur, the airline has also cancelled further flights until the end of February, while ensuring all customers booked to fly during the Chinese New Year peak travel period can travel as planned.

"We have worked hard to minimise the impact. Over 96% of customers affected between 1 January and 29 February have been given alternate flight options within 24 hours of their original departure time, while 93% have been protected onto other Cathay Pacific services, with the remaining protected onto our airline partners," he added.

“The disruption of this scale is far below the standard our customers have a right to expect, and far below the standard to which we hold ourselves. I am leading a task force to ensure we identify and resolve the underlying issues. We will ensure that we improve as a result and can deliver the high-quality services and reliability Hong Kong deserves," he said.

Meanwhile, secretary for transport and logistics Lam Sai Hung said on Facebook on Monday (8 January 2024) that he had expressed serious concern to the airline’s senior management and requested Cathay Pacific to carefully review flight scheduling and manpower arrangements, maintain good communication with employees and ensure that it provides stable and reliable services to passengers.

“At the same time, airlines have to conduct contingency plans and flexibly allocate resources to handle any possible emergencies,” Lam said.

Lam added that the authorities would maintain close monitoring of the situation, ensure ongoing communication with the airline and have instructed the Civil Aviation Department to continue monitoring Cathay Pacific’s relevant arrangements.

On the other hand, the Consumer Council has received four complaints from the flight giant’s customers regarding the arrangements and expressed deep concern about the arrangements.

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