Pilots saying advertisements during flight
 

Hello, I recently flew with Alaska/Horizon and I noticed that pilots gave some kind of advertisement for some credit card or something. What is the deal with that? Is that required? I don't like the idea of this profession being cheapened to the level of a credit card salesman.

What airlines do this?

The FA's on LUS do this on just about every flight, but I have never heard of a pilot doing it. Crazy.

I agree....this is unprofessional. Don't allow yourself to be used as a walking talking billboard. Next thing is pilots wearing a tie that says "welcome on board".

The flight attendants are selling credit cards... Not the pilots.

^^ perhaps it was the FAs, the flights was a few months ago and my memory of it is a bit cloudy. My apologies.

Actually it may have been a frequent flyer type of deal. Either way, I just remember that it was so pushy that I felt nearly uncomfortable.

It's the FA's who do the credit card push..

No pilot, ever, would do this....especially at a regional.

FTS

Heard a captain on an American mainline flight a few months back actually do this.

I make a high pressure timeshare pitch once the main cabin door closes. Gotta pay the bills somehow. :D

I've seen this before. Sometimes if they're good, they make it seem like a special announcement where it's everyone's lucky day and they're about to be recipients of a free gift or something then they proceed to talk about credit cards.

Having spent quite a bit of time in the back of Horizon airplanes, I can assure it was the flight attendants selling credit cards, and not anyone on the flight deck.

As I understand it, Visa pays the flight attendants a certain amount for every application that gets processed (along with bonuses for "top performers"), so there's a financial incentive for them to hawk the cards, despite the fact that most of the passengers just ignore the pitch or find it annoying.

His wife must have been working in the back, on the commission sales program...

I've heard a couple mainline AA pilots do it.

This is sort of a pet peev of mine.. we do announcements about that we're ready to push back, announce that we're number 46 for takeoff, now we're number 3 for takeoff.. the FA's follow all of these announcements with theirs, then its the top of climb and top of descent announcements, seat belt announcements in between, credit card announcement, that we're waiting on a gate announcement, that our gate is open and about to go park announcement..

By the time all this is done no wonder why the safety announcement gets tuned out by passengers.. or if we were to announce an impending evacuation, what percent of pax would tune that out like every other one? Each of my previously mentioned announcements are important in their own place, but over the flight as a whole we should be careful about how many we make. The PA should be thought of as an emergency device, because to a degree it is and may need to be used as one... Stuff like credit card sales degrade the value of a PA.

Just my thoughts on credit card PA's.. but then again Visa isn't paying me to make one..

We have one or two "special" pilots who will do this sort of thing... they make you want to slouch down in your seat as much as possible when you are in back and in uniform.

My apologies, it turns out that horizon doesn't have pilots do credit card pushes, but from my further research there are airlines that have their pilots do it.

I draw a sort of parallel between this situation and the situation of John Procter in the play The Crucible. Our "name" as pilots is degraded whenever we agree to repeat such spiels. It is a detriment to the image of the profession. At the end of my life, I want to be able to proudly declare that I was a pilot, not a credit card salesman.

I've heard rumors of several "high earners" bringing in several hundred a month in incentives on the Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian card.

"Now that we've passed 10,000ft, let me take some time to tell you about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ..."

Bottom line regional pilots will do as they are told and that's the end of it. Look at all the things you put up with today and tell me if they twist your arm a bit you won't do it. Of course you will, that's why you are in this mess to begin with because the majority have no balls.

@csucbrown ~ Use "Nearer My God to Thee" in the background...

Perhaps "seniority" is the euphemism for "balls"

I had a captain once during breast cancer awareness month (October) make an announcement every flight asking for donations to the breast cancer research foundation. He would then stand by the door and hold his hat out like a panhandler to collect the donations. I work at one of the big 3. My airline sold pink lemonade, and the flight attendants were allowed to collect for the cause, but I never read anything anywhere about pilots being allowed to collect. He claimed he would go to the flight attendant lounge to turn the money in. I thought his actions were embarrassing to himself and our profession. I would deplane first because I didn't want to witness it.

I think a call to Professional Standards would be in order