One Airline's Plan to Vaccinate All of Its Crew Members

There’s been a lot of talk in recent days of how the vaccine can, and should, be implemented in the airline industry. Now, however, it appears airlines are beginning to look inward.

Singapore Airlines has become the first airline to declare their intentions to vaccinate all crew members and staff, in an effort to alleviate concerns that employees may be contributing to the spread — an announcement that comes off the back of last week’s call for all passengers to be vaccinated as a prerequisite to flying, igniting heated debates amongst travel heads.

“We are grateful to the Singapore government for making the aviation sector a priority in the country’s vaccination exercise,” the airline CEO, Goh Choon Phong, said in a statement. “This reflects the sector’s importance and the crucial role we play in both Singapore’s economic recovery and the fight against the pandemic.”

Following the initial announcement, more than 5,000 Singapore Airlines employees have signed up to receive the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, the distribution of which is set to begin in just a few days. It’s a movement that Goh is throwing his full support behind.

Yesterday, we wrote about a marketing consultant who recently helped Swiss International Air Lines drastically improve customer satisfaction by implementing a number of policies meant to quell the many anxieties that plague air travelers. Given that coronavirus currently ranks as the number-one anxiety facing most passengers, Singapore’s decision provides further evidence that that’s exactly where airlines should be investing at the moment.

Since the start of the pandemic, Singapore has consistently boasted some of the lowest numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world, with only 29 documented cases of Covid-related deaths to date. It stands to reason that we should all be taking some notes here, and hopefully other airlines will be quick to follow suit, provided they do so in a responsible manner that ensures vaccinations aren’t taken out of the hands of the high-risk patients and frontline workers who need them most.