Cultural Incompetence at 38,000 Feet

Flying from London Heathrow to Chicago yesterday afternoon, I sat across the aisle from a woman wearing an Islamic head scarf and an abaya.  She spoke virtually no English, and the American Airlines flight attendants seemed incapable of modifying their approach to communicating with her.  Like something from a Monty Python skit, they resorted to repeating the English phrases, only louder and more slowly, only to receive the same bewildered expression from the woman in return.

I do not fault the flight attendants.  The monoculture that has been the United States is particularly lacking in cultural sensitivity and practice in dealing with such differences.  Rather, the fault lies with the airline, flying to and from the world's busiest international transit point (LHR), that fails to equip its cabin staff with the skills to easily communicate in a variety of ways beyond language.

The take-away is that if your business/school/university/whatever is going to be in the game of doing something (like American Airlines is in the game of international travel), then it must have the necessary support resources available to make its dealings easy for customers.  To do otherwise is both folly and an embarrassment.