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Religious accommodations on airlines: Deal with it before the airport, says expert

Religious accommodations on airlines: Deal with it before the airport, says expert

Canadians are an accommodating people, generally, but sometimes you can just get fed up.

That’s what happened to Christine Flynn, a Toronto chef, after she found herself the object of a game of musical chairs aboard a Porter Airlines flight from Newark, N.J., to Toronto.

According to the Toronto Star, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who was assigned the seat beside her started asking other passengers to change with him because Flynn was a woman who was not a relative and sitting beside her went against his religious beliefs.

What allegedly followed was an embarrassing attempt by the Porter flight attendant to find someone who would change seats with the man. Flynn told the Star it wasn’t so much that the man deigned not to sit beside her but that he and the flight attendant viewed her as the problem.

That, in a nutshell, was the real problem, says Brent Bowen, dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. It was not a religious-accommodation issue; it was a customer-service issue, he told Yahoo Canada.

“I find the airlines aren’t doing as good of a job as they could with training, cultural sensitivity and so on with their work force,” Bowen said in an interview. “Not only the in-flight service staff but the counter staff and others. When the airlines cut back everything, they cut back the amount of training.”

Cases of ultra-Orthodox Jews who balk at sitting beside females are not new. The New York Times reported in April that several flights from New York to Israel had been delayed or disrupted last year.

The conflict has sparked a lot of discussion about whether it was even religiously necessary. The debate spawned a spoof in-flight video that ends with an Orthodox man zipping into a plastic bubble to ensure no part of his body touches the woman next to him.

In response to the Porter incident, the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus issued a statement saying only a tiny minority of Orthodox Jews believe it is necessary and the onus is on them to inform the airlines beforehand.

Porter weathered a wave of turbulence in the wake of news reports about the incident. Comment threads attached to the stories and on social media largely supported Flynn and condemned the airline for even entertaining the man’s request.

“We certainly had at least one occasion where we had to remove a post from our Facebook page which was very violent in nature,” Porter spokesman Brad Cicero told Yahoo Canada.

Cicero said the situation developed quickly, before the flight attendant even became involved. The man had begun asking passengers to change and some offered to trade places with Flynn. The flight attendant asked Flynn if she was willing to switch (angry now, she refused). Eventually the Orthodox man found another seat and the flight left with no delay, said Cicero.


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The flight attendant would have handled it differently if he’d been there at the beginning, said Cicero, adding he did include her in the discussion and expressed sympathy.

“Our first position is we would have the other person switch seats and not have the other person who would be affected otherwise not have to move,” he said.

Situations rare, airlines say

Air Canada and WestJet told Yahoo Canada these situations are rare and are not generally recorded separately from other potential seating conflicts flight attendants deal with routinely.

WestJet spokesman Robert Palmer noted the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits businesses from discriminating on the basis of religion.

“There is a duty to accommodate, and there is also an obligation for the individual to participate in their own accommodation,” he pointed out.

Policies regarding accommodation of seating preferences vary from airline to airline, said Martine Maltais, spokeswoman for the Canadian Transportation Agency, which oversees disputes between carriers and passengers under a voluntary passengers’ rights code. Tariffs, the contracts between the airline and the paying passenger, generally stipulate seat selection is not guaranteed, she said via email.

“However, if a person believes that a provision in a carrier’s tariff is unclear, unjust, unreasonable or unduly discriminatory, they may submit a complaint to the agency,” said Maltais.

“To date, the agency has never received a complaint about reseating on religious grounds.”

Cicero said flight crew undergo “thorough training” on handling seating conflicts, including practising on stationary aircraft.

“It’s intended to encompass a range of situations, even though we might not have had something explicitly like this [religious accommodation] in the training,” he said. “This has given us a chance to reinforce some of the existing policies and make sure that everybody is operating with maybe a little bit more detail in this area going forward.”

Bowen, who helps run the university’s 15-year-old Airline Quality Rating project that tracks service performance of U.S. airlines, said many airlines now do online training that may not always focus enough on cultural and religious diversity.

Deal with the issue during ticket purchase, says expert

The whole issue might be avoidable if airlines dealt with it in the ticket-purchasing process, the way they do for kosher or halal meals and for people who want an aisle or window seat. They could charge a fee, as they do for any other special request.

“They could allow for the specification of, say, a religious preference,” said Bowen. “I think most people making special requests understand there’ll be a cost associated with that.”

Most customers wouldn’t use the feature, he said, but it could lessen the chances of an confrontation escalating to air rage and remove the pressure from flight attendants having to act as mediators.

Cicero said the idea sounds good in theory but it’s probably not realistic to include it in the online-booking process when it’s such a rare request. Passengers do have alternatives to let a carrier know their preferences either by phoning its call centre, during check-in or while waiting at the gate, he said.

“Regardless of how it’s set up, it still really does involve a requirement for self-disclosure,” said Cicero, echoing the view of other airline spokespeople.

Crowded airliners are perhaps unique among businesses, in that customers are trapped with each other in a metal tube thousands of metres in the sky. Some accommodation is necessary, including on religious tenets, said Bowen.

“This is only going to grow because the growth in air transport is certainly continuing to grow at a rapid pace,” he said.

Baptized Sikhs must carry a small dagger called a kirpan at all times as a symbol of their devotion but their faith allows them to leave it in their checked luggage when boarding a plane.

Devout Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day kneeling towards Mecca, no matter where they are. A Middle Eastern-based airline that Bowen flew on always showed the position of Mecca on the moving map displayed on the seat-back screen, but he’s never seen a Muslim pull out prayer rug and kneel in the aisle.

“You can’t anticipate every circumstance of life that may be coming your way,” he said.