❊ MEA’s Spectacular Lack of Transparency

What the Middle East Airlines (MEA) is going through these days is a public relations disaster:

Pilots working for Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines voted to hold a 48-hour strike from Monday night in protest at the dismissal of a colleague suffering from cancer.

This is bad because people will hate MEA for two reasons:

1. The inconvenience of cancelled and delayed flights
2. The fact that the people who run this place are monsters who fire Cancer patients

Both reasons will make people think twice before choosing MEA for their next flight. But the biggest problem is the opacity with which this is being handled. You’d expect management to be in damage control mode, but there was no public statement to explain the circumstances of the firing, and no proper communication with the customers. One man found out that his plane was delayed by reading a Lebanese blog , although he was actually in the airport.

This was the last item in MEA’s “news and press” section of their website: An announcement that some flights will be resuming as usual. Again, nothing to indicate if this was a decision by management to undermine the unions or some sort of settlement between the two parties.

Maybe they posted something on Twitter? I just checked; the last time they posted anything on Twitter was on February 22nd. It was a picture of an MEA fan. Keep things going the way they are and there won’t be many of those left around..