An open letter to Northwest Airlines

To whom it may concern:

I rode your roundtrip service from Tokyo to Beijing recently, and I have two bones to pick with you.

1. While I enjoy your in-seat entertainment system, I wish I could turn off the monitor during the initial ascent. We are a captive audience, but that doesn’t mean you should be able to force paying customers to sit through ads for products and services that they have no interest in.

2. On the flight back from Beijing, I happened to sit next to a middle-aged Japanese woman. When the food service cart came by, we found that the flight attendant spoke only English, and could only offer the unhelpful description “pork or omelette.” The woman could not speak any English, and so was unable to communicate that she could not eat meat. Had I not been there to translate, at the very least there could have been a wasted meal, or at worst we might have needed a doctor.

   Later in the flight, the beverage service came by and the woman asked for water, in Japanese of course. Again, the flight attendant didn’t understand, so I translated. After this second encounter, the attendant said to the woman, knowing that she wouldn’t understand, “You should really learn some English.” While the flight attendant’s tone was not snide or sarcastic, I still feel that this was completely out of line. If your company flies to Japan, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the flight attendants to know at least minimal Japanese, like “water.” And it’s not like this woman just came back from an English-speaking country, where one might expect her to know some English.

   The flight attendant in question was having a hard time communicating with all of the non-English speakers on the flight, be they Chinese or Japanese. She was probably tired and frustrated, which is understandable. But it is completely unacceptable to blame the customer for not speaking a foreign language. I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman was quite put off by the service on that flight; I think you’d be lucky to have her as a customer again.

Thank you for your time.

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