Qatar Airways’ moral posturing
State-owned flag carrier banking on a curious mix of PR stunts and corporate ruthlessness to weather the crisis
For a carrier that prides itself on the “five-star airline rating” granted by the ranking site Skytrax, Qatar Airways has surprised the global aviation industry during the coronavirus crisis by flying headlong into a PR disaster.
At a time when almost every airline in the world was reeling from a travel slowdown and financial hemorrhage, Qatar’s stateowned flag carrier had the option of taking the route of minimum turbulence.
Instead, for reasons perhaps known only to top management at the airline’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar Airways has bet on a strategy that is a mix of virtue signaling and corporate bullying.
This is no surprise given Qatar’s well-documented record of simultaneously exploiting foreign migrant workers and making solemn public pledges to improve their rights. Take the announcement of free tickets for 100,000 doctors and nurses to any destination it flies around the world.
On the face of it, the concept — picturized with the help of models stylishly posing as health-care professionals — demonstrates Qatar Airways’ appreciation of frontline workers who have been risking their lives since the coronavirus pandemic hit. At a time when carriers across the world are facing dire cash-flow problems as a result of airport shutdowns and passenger-traffic collapse, CEOs and CFOs can hardly be faulted for trying to think outside the box.
But Qatar Airways’ free-tickets scheme smells so strongly of an attempt to divert media attention away from its mid-pandemic cost-cutting exercise, it is not just cynics who have dismissed it as too clever by half.
For all Qatar’s promises of labor reform, the rhetoric did not match the reality on the ground.
Ditto for Qatar Airways’ claim in March, when its competitors were cutting flights from their schedules, that it was adding extra seats back to its network because its mission was to “reunite stranded passengers with their loved ones.” These stunts have collectively succeeded in drawing additional scrutiny of the carrier’s handling of its cutbacks and treatment of its flight crews, to say nothing of the pervasive violation of workers’ rights by Qatari companies.
“We had no choice. We were