Air India is to force most flight attendants to share hotel rooms during their layovers as part of a major policy change, which is certain to raise eyebrows and has already caused an uproar amongst the Indian flag carrier’s cabin crew workforce.
The decision to implement the controversial change is because the Indian airline Vistara is being merged into Air India, so the airline has decided to combine the flight attendant contracts from the two airlines into a single policy.
Vistara flight attendants have traditionally been made to share hotel rooms on layovers, so Air India has taken this policy and merged it into the combined flight attendant contract, much to the dismay of Air India’s veteran crew members.
Air India hopes to implement the new contract from December 1, at which point cabin crew and cabin seniors will be required to share a hotel room with another crew member. Cabin managers and cabin executives will, however, still enjoy their own hotel rooms.
There are, at least, some positives to the new combined contract as Air India flight attendants will now see their international layover allowances increase from between $75 and $125 to between $85 and $135.
As for domestic layovers, flight attendants at Air India have traditionally had their breakfast paid for by the airline, but from December 1, the carrier will cover the cost of all meals.
This isn’t the first time that Air India’s flight attendants have been told that they’ll be required to share hotel rooms. Back in 2018, the then-government-controlled carrier was desperately trying to cut costs and proposed making flight attendants share hotel rooms.
That proposal wasn’t implemented in the end, and the Indian government eventually sold the debt-laden flag carrier to Indian conglomerate Tata & Son, which reacquired the airline in September 2022.
Tata is pumping billions of dollars into the airline as part of a significant turnaround project, which includes ending the Vistara airline brand that it created in partnership with Singapore Airlines.
When Vistara was created, the carrier decided not to hire male cabin crew because it wanted flight attendants to share hotel rooms and didn’t want to be in a position where rooms would be single-occupied by a lone male cabin crew.
It wasn’t until 2018 that Vistara eventually started hiring male cabin crew, saying that it had waited until it had “reached a certain scale of operations where we could efficiently roster and deploy mixed crew.”
A couple of years ago, the management team behind the failed bid to resurrect India’s Jet Airways also said they only planned to hire female flight attendants because they wanted crew members to share hotel rooms as part of an extreme cost-saving initiative.
Cabin crew at other international airlines aren’t expected to share hotel rooms, although Emirates sometimes makes its Cabin Service Attendants – dedicated crew members who look after the First Class Shower and Spa on Airbus A380s – share hotel rooms.
