Qatar Airways (under the Al Baker leadership) has banned a popular Youtuber and Airline reviewer from all further services after he posted an unfavorable review of the carrier’s Economy Class during a recent flight.
The video titled “The shocking decline of Qatar Airways” was posted after many extremely positive reviews over the years showcasing the very solid products that QR has to offer but it still didn’t sit well with management.
The matter was apparently still handled under the tenure of former CEO Akbar Al Baker, who stepped down from his role on November 5th after spending over two decades making Qatar Airways into the powerhouse in the aviation market that it is today.
He was always very outspoken and controversial, plus he instituted quite a few rules that were seen by his critics as abuse of his employees – and sometimes even went beyond that.
Josh Cahill is one of the big names in the airline review field who has stuck his GoPro into hundreds of airline cabins, and while I’m not huge on watching the reviews of any YouTuber, I often watch some of their videos if they pop up in my feed. This one has certainly caught my attention as it was posted last Saturday, and Cahill teased it a couple of days prior.
Here is the initial review video in its entirety:
I saw it at the time and remember thinking to myself “yeah, no big surprise here”. Qatar was never famous for it’s great Economy Class which I have flown 3-4 times in the past. It was always a mediocre mass-market product with bad food, and QR quite obviously fills its cabins with extremely cheap Economy tickets. The food has always, without exception, been a disgusting slob way below the average of the Economy Class product that the competition offers. The video was fair and not slanderous.
Quite contrary to that, Qatar Airways has excellent Business Class and First Class cabins. That’s where Qatar Airways pulls out all the stops and invests every penny they can spare. Fair enough and based on that I have flown QR’s premium cabins dozens of times.
Qatar Airways and in particular ex-CEO al Baker didn’t share the viewpoint that sometimes you have to swallow constructive criticism, especially those that’s documented on camera.
What happened next was summarized by Cahill this weekend:
Al Baker and his management team went really off the deep end here. Let’s just assume for a moment that all that Cahill says is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt that), the reaction of a major company to something as inconsequential as a Youtube review is completely insane.
Some bullet points of what happened here:
- Youtuber documents a rather sad flights, showcasing a lack of hygiene and quality during a CMB-DOH flight segment operated by Qatar Airways
- The interior of this aircraft was extremely old and worn out, there were filthy spots and the toilets were (allegedly) extremely dirty throughout the flight
- Video is uploaded and receives hundreds of thousands of views, CEO Al Baker is not impressed
- Communications team gets in touch with the YouTuber and offers him a press flight as compensation (a bribe if you want to call it that) in order to delete the video – he refuses
- Management then mandates the staff on that flight to contact the Youtuber and beg to remove the video or at least their image
- Company tries to get the video taken down by filing a takedown notice with Youtube – unsuccessfully!
- Al Baker personally dismisses / fires the entire crew on that particular flight
- Youtuber receives an email from Qatar Airways concerning an upcoming reservation, saying that he is no longer allowed to travel on Qatar Airways due to violations of their regulations and they will refund him for any outstanding tickets
Pretty sure I missed some other reprehensible details Qatar did here, but this is the essence of the story.
I don’t get the approach from beginning to end because none of what Qatar Airways did here made any sense.
Every day, dozens and hundreds of people film all kinds of things and even publish reviews. We live in an age where literally everybody has a camera in hand so no matter who it is, be it airlines, hotels, restaurants or governments should be aware that anything negative will find its way onto the internet rather quickly.
That being said, due to the mass amount of information and such reviews, it’s being forgotten and flushed out of the news cycle rather quickly as long as they won’t do anything to draw more attention to it. Unfortunately, some people are just too arrogant to accept the truth even if there is documentary evidence and Akbar Al Baker is one of these people.
To offer a YouTuber, blogger, journalist or whatever a bribe isn’t exactly a way of delicately getting the problem out of the way. Usually, they can’t just delete an article, and all is well again. The internet doesn’t forget things; everything is stored somewhere, and it looks extremely suspicious if a video or news article just vanishes.
In this case, it makes no sense to offer Cahill a free flight as “compensation” because the video itself is worth thousands of dollars, and he probably spent over a day flying and editing it. Someone who flies over 100 segments per year doesn’t need more free flights, quite the contrary.
Nobody would have cared about this review anymore after a few months, but he couldn’t leave it alone and make a PR disaster out of the case. This is commonly known as the Streisand Effect. The same goes for my immigration situation in Bali a year or so back, by the way. The news cycle would have flushed this out within a short period of time, and that’d be the end of it, but making a spectacle out of it has the opposite effect.
What Al Baker, his management team, and Qatar Airways did here certainly sent him out with a big bang, which is rather sad considering all that he has achieved for the company. The last action he’ll be remembered for is to create a PR disaster for the company.
The new CEO of Qatar Airways, Badr Mohammed Al-Meer, has been running the company for a bit over a month now and has already reviewed many of the policies his predecessor, Al Baker, put in place. One of the first things he removed was the controversial curfew for crewmembers who were confined to their corporate housing during certain hours. He is also looking at other aspects of the company, many of which have caused bad headlines internationally.
Where does this case go from here?
Should the airline under the directive of the new CEO – unban Cahill, I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be flying back to Qatar or even transiting there, considering he made such enemies. The crewmembers are likely SOL and collateral damage of this sad case. Even if their contracts were to be reinstated, their managers would likely watch them like hawks in the future. Is this an environment anyone would like to work in? Probably not.
Conclusion
Qatar Airways’s former CEO, Mr. Al Baker, has taken the criticism of one YouTuber a bit too much to heart and, following a bad flight review, has fired all crewmembers involved as well as banned the blogger from the airline for good.
As of now, it appears that he is still banned and that the respective employees have lost their job. Since this happened, a new CEO has been appointed, and Al Baker departed the company. While likely unrelated to this particular incident, it might be that the company has indeed stalled, and quality did go wrong, as alleged by many customers, not just Josh Cahill. If a company is led by one crazy authoritarian whose word is law, then there is no real progress, and that can be a danger to the organization. The same goes for hotels that have the same General Manager for a very long time, nothing ever changes.
Maybe the new leadership team is more aware than Mr. Al Baker that operating a company can’t succeed with force and coercion in the long run. The company needs to retain and recruit talented staff members internationally due to a shortage of staff in Qatar itself (same as all the other ME3’s). You won’t be able to accomplish that task by mistreating employees. Such news makes the rounds rather quickly, and horrible PR won’t help to make the situation any better.