Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review
onemileatatime.com
onemileatatime.com
Seems like the concept of the channel is built on negativity and drama, I knew who they banned the moment I read the title. Qatar Airways must have given huge boost and fuel for more videos and they might regret that decision.
Previously Qatar Airways was having a publicity stunts against Airbus and their a350 plane which has some paint issues that look horrible but apparently safe to fly. IIRC they lost in court in London and it seems like the airline was looking for ways to offload the losses during the pandemic by claiming that the planes weren't flying because they were not safe. Airbus fired Qatar Airways as a customer over this, which is quite shocking considering that they were the lunch customer of the said plane(they later settled).
Maybe Qatar Airways should re-think their PR.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-qa...
I've been a pilot and I would not be happy flying a plane in that state.
Don't forget even NASA has said things were perfectly safe when they were not, leading to two tragic fatal accidents. Boeing insisted MCAS was totally safe until the second mass fatality. I don't buy that stuff. You don't fly a plane in such a state.
While disagreeing with at least half the critique (like pretending it's "never happened across 600 flights" (something to be proud of!) to run out of a certain meal type), the one thing I want to call out is his expectation that any crew is happy to see him personally and act somewhat like how servants are described to act in medieval novels (one of many examples from the video: "back in the day, I loved the eagerness [of Qatar Air's] staff"). I've heard it's a USA thing to require waiters/waitresses to smile literally the whole shift no matter what they're actually feeling as well as to have greeters at supermarket entrances. Checking Wikipedia, he grew up in Germany, so I'm not quite sure where this comes from but this is what stood out to me as the most unreasonable and useless expectation when they're doing their job perfectly well
Edit: as this commenter on the video also said
> Can we also talk about why the toilets are messy when grown adults are the ones flying. It is unfair for passengers to mess up toilets and expect another human being to clean up your filth after you. [...] The crew are not slaves so please treat them with dignity.
There’s a reason traditional restaurant critics usually pay for their own meals.
I'm tired of doing what my clients want too, but they have currency and I want their currency.
There are clients bad enough that I don't want their currency. But even the best clients require me to bite the bullet sometimes.
You might think this is an outlier, but what authority is going to hold the airline to account? How are you going to convince any YouTuber to give an Ho eat review of the airline ever again?
It's next to impossible to make money off travel journalism/blogging anyway, which is why the mid-tier (big enough to get sponsored, small enough that they can't rock the boat) has always been in the industry's pocket.
Under HIPAA an entity cannot retaliate against you for filing a complaint. You should notify OCR [Office for Civil Rights] immediately in the event of any retaliatory action.
why in the world do you feel it would be anything different?
However, I'd argue that they should be treated like a utility, and that it should not be their right to arbitrarily refuse service.
Banning people for valid reasons should be the job of airport security and the courts.
Air travel warrants higher scrutiny.
At least in Western countries, being barred from one carrier is largely irrelevant to one’s ability to travel, that it’s hard to see a good argument for not allowing it.
Google, at least, is vastly more pervasive for most people.
If other airlines banned this flyer as well would that be a problem?
Airlines should on the other hand be free to set their own restrictions on filming in their planes and publishing that material – clearly communicated at the time of booking. I’ve been on a flight with a Youtube “personality” just looking for drama with the airline, and even as a bystander I found it obnoxious (and I didn’t want to end up in that video myself).
If some idiot ends up blacklisted by enough airlines that air travel becomes impractical for them, tough shit. He can still travel by land or sea, and those methods of travel are also considered privileges.
Noone is entitled to means of travel beyond their own two feet, or a practical equivalent for the handicapped, in spaces they have a right to access.
If the airlines passed names around, it’s effectively a worse NFL and, I think, should either be prohibited or run by a very transparent agency with clear challenge rules. No comment on how realistic the latter actually is.
- https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html#r...
Buncha bums running the show
https://youtu.be/gJPtwy7gAgM?si=j6xsLJVley7hYllA
The same sort of “they tried take my video down” and “the staff emailed me”.
It seems to be his spiel. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valid, but it is interesting.
In any case, if you're flying with Qatar, you're flying with Qatar. It's entirely fair to judge an airline based on any route that they operate under their own name.
It's only the Middle Eastern airlines who treat subcontinent flights as "second class" routes btw, with lesser aircraft, new or low-performing crew, substandard food - and this is entirely because the airline employees that plan these routes are racist. I daresay even on ME-Europe routes South Asian passengers are treated differently by these airlines.
The Streisand effect is strong.
To me, a thought leader is someone at the top of a legitimate field and leading the way. Not some guy who was wronged by an airline and spent an epic amount of time crafting a tirade against them.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/21/austr...
The airline and the cou try have lost my business forever because of the incident. We have had 4 trips of 6 people where this is one of the main stops on a possible route, and I've actively avoided booking that route because I don't believe in su jecting the women of my family to the particular injustices I believe were committed here.
I also believe the local authority figures who completed this search were later fired.
> Women on 10 flights, including five Australians who were on a Sydney-bound Qatar Airways flight, were removed from planes at gunpoint and taken into ambulances on the tarmac.
> Some were instructed to remove their underwear and some were forced to submit to invasive gynaecological examinations for evidence they had recently given birth.
///
My original comment is above, as many replies indicate, I did not include the context, which is:
> women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
I apologize for not providing the full context.
> On 2 October 2020, women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
Does the (real or perceived) need for immediacy justify the incredible level of invasiveness of this mass surveillance?
So while I find the methods questionable, I also accept there is merit in pursuing methods that can give reasonable evidence towards an arrest now before the mother can high tail it.
Immediacy is definitely warrented. I'm unsure if the invasiveness is, but obviously a 24 hour+ process isn't viable.
"mass surveillance" this is not; invasive - absolutely.
What you're proposing, if I was a woman (I am not) to be searched is instead i have to give up my DNA to have them store on record in case I was the person who abandoned the newborn.
That's much closer to "mass surveillance" than a body search.
If given the choice, I would give the body search 100%.
How so? I'm imagining they're intending to detain and investigate indiscriminately every woman of child-bearing age in the airport and on flights that recently boarded. That seems to meet the definition to me.
They can't keep doing it, that's the biggest part it stops.
Mass surveillance has a definition[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#:~:text=Ma....
Yes!
> If there was a murderer loose would you let the suspects fly out?
Absent any probable cause (or even articulable specific suspicion) against a particular individual? Yes!
If someone is murdered by a woman in my city, we don’t detain all women.
I get that Qatar doesn’t have the US Fourth Amendment (and perhaps no enumeration of rights of the people), but this behavior would be considered absurd (ly unconstitutional) here.
And they found the mother so seems like it worked.
There isn't if you're looking for a fast answer.
> women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
While I personally don't think this justifies their actions, I do think it matters that this was not a completely random "let's inspect some vaginas".
'A short time later, Josh received an email from one of the flight attendants who was working his flight, acknowledging that “I know I gave you permission to film the interaction, but I must ask you to remove me from the video,” because “I was pressured to write a statement that I didn’t give you permission to be filmed,” and “if I don’t write it, I will most likely be dismissed”'
'Since Josh wasn’t willing to voluntarily take down the video, Qatar Airways took all of these statements from crew and sent them to YouTube, demanding that the video be removed for privacy reasons.'
Fast forward to our aborted attempt at entering the country. We are denied boarding on Qatar airways for our return flight via Doha with our booked stopover. Apparently there is some sort of electronic approval process we did not perform - mind you, we had already filed the forms including our negative Covid tests taken in country- but to no avail. Qatar airways refused to rebook us as they claimed we were a no show. After hours of calls with the airline we finally convinced them to rebook us at no cost, without the stopover. Discover Qatar continues to this day to refuse a refund for a hotel stay we could not use as we were denied entry.
First world problems, yes, but when you’re looking for tourism dollars, don’t piss off your customer base.
If I messed up travel forms, I wouldn't expect the airline to cover for me. The fact that you got a new flight for free is pretty amazing to be honest.
The Qatar websites were not clear and when I called the Qatar health authorities ahead of the trip to clarify, they refused to give any guidance but assured me that my circumstances would allow me to travel and complete my stopover without an issue.
So I did the best I could and had a 1/2” binder with dozens of pages of documentation with me during the whole trip. At some point there is only so much research you can do and at the end of the day you’re just subject to an arbitrary interpretation of a vague and rapidly changing rules written in a language you don’t understand.
Isn't your gripe with the Qatari government then rather than the airline? They set the rules and guidelines. You called their health authorities rather than the airline. They told you it'd be fine.
I know travel was totally fucked back then, I remember spending many hours trying to figure out what I'd need to enter/leave a country and it always being nerve racking if they'd let me in or not. But at the end of the day, I knew if some place didn't let me in, it'd be ultimately my fault.
I still think the airline did you a massive favor by giving you a new flight for free. That was them trying to not piss off tourists.
Don't get me wrong, fuck Qatar and Qatar airways. I hate everything they stand for. But reading your story makes me think they have really good customer service. I wouldn't expect any airline to do that for me.
Placing “no show” in the record to try and blame us was definitely not good customer service.
Sure my gripe may be with the government, but what difference does it make? They are one and the same given that both entities will point fingers at each other. I tried calling Qatar airways first - they were the ones who suggested calling the health authorities.
As I’ve posted on this site in the past, I am very meticulous when preparing documentation for foreign trips. So I spent hours researching the policies and procedures and had dozens of pages of documentation on me as a contingency plan. I would expect that an airline would do the same if you were in a similar situation after the significant research you’ve done! I would not just give up and say it’s your fault. That’s not an acceptable outcome in my opinion, especially after you’ve taken pains to do the right thing.
I didn’t expect any compensation but I did expect them to make good on the contract of carriage to get us home by rebooking us on the same itinerary just without the day long stopover.
However they failed to even send me the voucher within 24 hours, so when I called back, I was told the flight would be an extra US$3,000.
I tried to explain the issue, that they never send me the voucher, and due to that I would be on the hook for extra costs? The support agent was totally uncooperative, and just kept asking "what would you like to do". Turned into a bit of a shouting match.
In the end I had my flight cancelled, and a voucher was issued straight away.
I still don't understand why they couldn't just look at their own logs, realize they actually didn't send the voucher, and just book me on the original flight. Or why the first support agent couldn't just use my voucher to pay for the flight.
This was also a business class flight, so I can't imagine how economy passengers are treated.
First of all they don’t give them to you immediately, so if you just want to cancel a flight and book another, tough luck. Wait or lose it.
Second they promise an additional percentage if you get the voucher instead of the refund (this was started in Covid so people would not request a monetary refund). Then you go use the voucher and lo and behold: the voucher was not for 100% of the fare, “some fees are unrefundable”, and that extra percentage just about restores the fare to the original price you spent.
So it’s nice that they offer the voucher, but why lie about any extras? This bit me in the ass when instead of requesting a “full refund within 24 hours” I just requested the voucher instead, locking me into Qatar unnecessarily.
It’s an absolute dictatorship. The government and the airline are the same thing.
Did you not try charging back via your credit card company?
I never understood the "let's suck up to them, because maybe they will improve then" mindset that led to the world cup beind held there. If it was up to me we would have boycot the whole thing.
I think its more like - Europe needs gas.
One plus in Qatar's column: they fund Al Jazeera, which has cast a lot of light on a lot of underreported issues in the region and around the world, although Qatar itself gets a free pass.
Again, not trying to claim the Qataris are angels here, but singling them out as somehow worse than the rest also doesn't really ring true.
They are much to involved in playing the game compared to Switzerland.
It's basically Qatar/Turkiye/Iran versus UAE/Saudi/Egypt.
A similar foreign policy change would be Thailand's flip from Pro-American to Pro-China in the 2010s due to CP's lobbying and Bhumihol's passing.