Chronicle No. 46 · Lessons

Three and a Half Months Before You Serve: The Singapore Airlines Standard

An icon in a sarong kebaya, and one of the longest cabin crew training programmes in aviation. The two are not a coincidence.

In 1972, the year Singapore Airlines began flying under its own name, the agency Batey Inc., founded by Ian Batey, built a campaign around a single figure: the Singapore Girl. The French couturier Pierre Balmain was engaged to rework the sarong kebaya uniform first introduced by Malaysia-Singapore Airlines in 1968. Colour still signals rank, from blue for the most junior cabin crew through green and red to purple for the in-flight supervisor.

It worked almost too well. In 1994 Madame Tussauds in London unveiled a Singapore Girl in wax, reportedly the first figure there to represent a commercial brand. The airline has also spent decades answering the charge that the image is sexist and casts Asian women as subservient, and has said the icon is staying.

What interests hospitality people is the machinery underneath the poster. New cabin crew go through a training programme of around three and a half months, among the longest in the industry, in small batches of roughly twenty. The syllabus is far wider than trays and trolleys:

• Safety procedures and first aid
• Service sequence and etiquette
• Grooming and deportment
• Communication with passengers
• Food and wine appreciation

The lesson is about sequencing. Almost every hotel and restaurant group in the world announces a service promise. Very few fund the months of rehearsal that make the promise survivable on a bad day, in a full cabin, at four in the morning.

A brand is a debt. Training is how you pay it.

Lesson: A service promise made in advertising becomes a liability unless the training behind it is longer than the campaign.