Health insurance firm apologises after furious response from flight attendants over advice to passengers to ‘ask cabin crew to lift heavy baggage for you’
- A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge posted the advice to its thousands of members
- The advice, from Axa, drew almost 1,000 comments in response
- One attendant said: ‘We hurt ourselves and we can’t safely carry out duties’
A major healthcare insurance firm has apologised after tweeting that passengers should ask cabin crew to ‘lift heavy baggage’ to ‘prevent plane pain’.
The advice was tweeted by Paris-based Axa Healthcare but was retracted and changed to ‘only pack what you can lift’ after the original post caused uproar on a cabin crew Facebook forum.
A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge posted Axa’s advice to its thousands of members, drawing over 900 comments in response.
Axa Healthcare tweeted that passengers should ask cabin crew to ‘lift heavy baggage’ to ‘prevent plane pain’. However, it retracted the advice after it caused uproar
The post was captioned: ‘Oh hell no! The international insurance firm Axa released their list of travel tips and their number one suggestion for avoiding back pain when traveling is… ASK CABIN CREW TO LIFT HEAVY BAGGAGE!
‘As the largest crew community on social media, why don’t we tell them what we, the cabin crew, think of their advice.’
The members didn’t hold back.
One flight attendant said: ‘We’re not mere helpers inflight. We’re safety professionals.’
Another said: ‘You pack it, you stack it, you bring it, you sling it. We hurt ourselves and we can’t safely carry out our duties. End of.’
The new advice that Axa tweeted after members of A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge challenged the previous tweet
Jay Robert, a cabin crew member at a major international airline for more than a decade and founder of A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge, told MailOnline Travel: ‘I’ve already had one back surgery from injuries caused by lifting heavy bags and most seasoned crew have damage to the skeletal frame as a result of a run-in with heavy bags or closing bins overloaded with heavy luggage.
‘It’s such an issue. Most airlines don’t cover crew if they’re injured lifting passengers’ bags because so many injuries happen from this. So we are instructed not to lift them and when we try to explain that to passengers some think we don’t want to be helpful, but we are saving our backs and keeping them ready in case we need them for an emergency, which is the main reason we are on the plane.’
A spokesperson for Axa told MailOnline Travel: ‘We apologise to those who challenged our comment about cabin crew and heavy baggage.
‘And we changed our comment for those taking flights in line with the feedback we received to “only pack what you can lift”.’
Axa apologised to the cabin crew members of A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge