Poll on Flight attendant “attractiveness” comes under fire

Stewardess on the airfield. Place for your text.
By Daisy Melwani


An American-based travel website, Trippy.com has received backlash after launching a poll to rate the attractiveness of female flight attendants in a bid to find the world’s hottest hostie.

Since publishing the results, critics have come out in force saying the poll objectifies women and undermines their role in safe air travel.

Trippy.com asked 2000 visitors to its site to rate flight attendants based on physical appearance on a scale of 1 to 10, according to a report on News.com.au. In order to do so, for each carrier, the website showed a composite photo generated from 50 faces of women listed as airline employees on LinkedIn.

The respondents ranked Emirates to have the most perceived ‘attractive’ female flight attendants, followed by American Airlines and Canadian-based WestJet.

Each airline was represented by a composite image generated from 50 faces of its flight attendants, taken from LinkedIn. Picture: Trippy.com

Image credit: Trippy.com Source:Supplied via news.com.au – composite picture of flight attendants gathered from LinkedIn.

In December, various publications reported on the survey, with some describing it as an “outdated, sexist approach to a poll”, the paper reports.

The airlines were then ranked based on the survey results. Picture: Trippy.com

The airlines ranking based on the survey results. Picture: Trippy.com Source:Supplied via news.com.au

More recently, the USA’s largest union of flight attendants have come out to publicly condemn the poll. Taylor Garland, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA — which represents 50,000 people over 18 airlines — told Fox News in an email that flight attendants are “on-board to ensure the safety, health and security” of passengers on board, per the news.com.au report.

“Training and experience is what matters when an emergency occurs at 30,000 feet,” Garland said, reported by the paper. “The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA has fought for over 70 years to stop these discriminatory and sexist practices in the aviation industry and across the world.”

According to the report, Trippy stated that the ratings don’t reflect the airlines’ “service and ability to provide a great in-flight experience”.

A spokeswoman from Trippy told Fox News, as reported by news.com.au, that the website’s decision to involve only women for its “attractiveness” was intentional.

“For the purposes of collecting the most accurate data for our survey, we saw it best to do a separate analysis rather than combining men and women, due to the larger availability of female photos on LinkedIn, the source for our study,” the spokeswoman told the paper.

“We’ll be following up with a men-only version of the campaign in the future. Trippy values the importance and duty of flight attendants in keeping passengers safe.”

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