United Airlines today announced John Slater has been named senior vice president of in-flight services, overseeing United's 24,000 flight attendants. John previously served as vice president of United's in-flight team and brings with him decades of experience and a deep commitment to providing excellent customer service on board United's flights.
"John has the experience and passion to lead our Inflight team, and he brings with him a first-hand view of what it takes to deliver great service to our customers," said Greg Hart, chief operations officer at United. "His understanding and appreciation that we are a people business are clear, and I am excited to have him supporting our dedicated flight attendants."
John, who at the beginning of his career served as a flight attendant for People Express Airlines, previously served as vice president of United's O'Hare hub. Under his tenure in that position, O'Hare delivered its best operational performance ever and consistently topped the competition in the market. He also spent several years with the United sales group, last serving as vice president of the Americas region.
His first day in this new role will be Monday, June 11th. However, the announcement has not been universally welcomed by the rank and file of United's flight attendents. Recently Slater has fired off not one, but two emails to the cabin staff criticising their standards of dress, Slater told them to take care of details such wrinkled shirts, worn footwear and skirts that don’t quite adhere to regulation style. In the second email, he told flight attendants they had, "lost focus on the value uniform standards have on our customers’ perception of our company,”
United is currently embarking on designing and implementing new uniforms for its entire workforce and the samples that have been seen by staff are, according to several cabin crew members, pretty awful. "The colours are vile, so bad it actually hurts the eyes." one flight attendant told us and said that some of her colleagues had emailed the airlines CEO to say how bad they thought they were. Some staff see Slater's email rants to cabin crew as a way of getting back at them from criticising the potential new uniforms that he is partly responsible for.
