Featured Post
Free The Hostages! Bring Them Home!
(this is a featured post and will stay at the top for the foreseeable future.. scroll down for new posts) -------------------------------...
Aug 7, 2012
Should El Al Fly On Shabbos?
Former Director of British Airways in Israel Alex Rabino has figured out how to solve El Al's problems.
El Al has been in a very bad financial situation. Rabino claims that none of the proposed solutions, mostly business proposals to improve efficiency, will work. The reason is, according to Rabino, that there is no way El Al can ever be a profitable company when it only flies 5.5 days in a week.
That statement is in direct opposition to the claims made when pressuring El Al to not fly on Shabbos - that the only way they can be profitable is by not flying on Shabbos.
Rabino claims that the indicator for this is that foreign airlines running Tel Aviv lines all week including Shabbos are operating profitable lines, while El Al is not.
Rabino also says that El Al's excuse for not flying on Shabbos, so as not to lose the religious and haredi consumer, is wrong, and their threat to take their business elsewhere is a bluff that should be called. Rabino says the religious consumer is not the bulk of the business, and El Al could withstand the loss of their business, even if they were to keep to their threat to abandon El Al. However, Rabino claims that the religious public would not abandon El Al. The main reason they would stay with El Al is due to price considerations, and secondary reasons are religious reasons - that they can eat the food on El Al without concern, while on other airlines they always have to be concerned about kosher food, and the ovens being used for non-kosher food, and all the other airlines also fly on Shabbos...
Rabino might not realize that the reason the problem is only with El Al flying on Shabbos but other airlines flying on Shabbos does not bother the religious and haredi public is because they are either owned by non-jews or represent non-jewish countries. While El Al is no longer owned by the Jewish country, it is still considered to be representative of Israel, and is seen as Israel's national airline. it is the Jewish identity that creates the Shabbos problem for religious people. And regarding kashrut, the problem is easily solvable by double wrapping the food. Just about every airline in the world serves kosher and mehadrin meals, and religious passengers fly those airlines and eat the food with no reservation.
At the end of the day, Rabino says it is mainly an issue of price, and if El Al could be competitive and offer good prices on flights, specifically because they would fly on Shabbos, than the religious and haredi public would ignore the chillul shabbos and would fly El Al.
While price is important, he should not discount the chillul shabbos as an important issue. Plenty of people will pay a higher price rather than support an El Al that desecrates Shabbos. that number of people might not be significant enough to prevent El Al from switching over, but if they have not until now than that is not really the reason they are not flying on Shabbos. they must know what percentage of their passengers, more or less, are haredi and might care.
And, once again, El Al's level of profitability should not be tied, by the religious consumer, to whether or not El Al is shomer or mechalel shabbat. The reason they should stay grounded (if you believe that they should) is because in some way they represent Israel, and Israel should publicly be seen as not desecrating Shabbos, many would say even at the cost of closing the airline before allowing them to be mechalel shabbat..
Personally I am not so convinced that El Al is representative of Israel, and even if they are that that should really make a difference. El Al is privately held. The fact that some people still think of it as Israel's airline is not the problem of the owners. They should have the ability to make the decision whether or not to fly on Shabbos, without the issue becoming a national issue. El Al does not represent me or you or anyone else. they are a company with a team of owners who are concerned about the bottom line.
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
El Al has been in a very bad financial situation. Rabino claims that none of the proposed solutions, mostly business proposals to improve efficiency, will work. The reason is, according to Rabino, that there is no way El Al can ever be a profitable company when it only flies 5.5 days in a week.
That statement is in direct opposition to the claims made when pressuring El Al to not fly on Shabbos - that the only way they can be profitable is by not flying on Shabbos.
Rabino claims that the indicator for this is that foreign airlines running Tel Aviv lines all week including Shabbos are operating profitable lines, while El Al is not.
Rabino also says that El Al's excuse for not flying on Shabbos, so as not to lose the religious and haredi consumer, is wrong, and their threat to take their business elsewhere is a bluff that should be called. Rabino says the religious consumer is not the bulk of the business, and El Al could withstand the loss of their business, even if they were to keep to their threat to abandon El Al. However, Rabino claims that the religious public would not abandon El Al. The main reason they would stay with El Al is due to price considerations, and secondary reasons are religious reasons - that they can eat the food on El Al without concern, while on other airlines they always have to be concerned about kosher food, and the ovens being used for non-kosher food, and all the other airlines also fly on Shabbos...
Rabino might not realize that the reason the problem is only with El Al flying on Shabbos but other airlines flying on Shabbos does not bother the religious and haredi public is because they are either owned by non-jews or represent non-jewish countries. While El Al is no longer owned by the Jewish country, it is still considered to be representative of Israel, and is seen as Israel's national airline. it is the Jewish identity that creates the Shabbos problem for religious people. And regarding kashrut, the problem is easily solvable by double wrapping the food. Just about every airline in the world serves kosher and mehadrin meals, and religious passengers fly those airlines and eat the food with no reservation.
At the end of the day, Rabino says it is mainly an issue of price, and if El Al could be competitive and offer good prices on flights, specifically because they would fly on Shabbos, than the religious and haredi public would ignore the chillul shabbos and would fly El Al.
While price is important, he should not discount the chillul shabbos as an important issue. Plenty of people will pay a higher price rather than support an El Al that desecrates Shabbos. that number of people might not be significant enough to prevent El Al from switching over, but if they have not until now than that is not really the reason they are not flying on Shabbos. they must know what percentage of their passengers, more or less, are haredi and might care.
And, once again, El Al's level of profitability should not be tied, by the religious consumer, to whether or not El Al is shomer or mechalel shabbat. The reason they should stay grounded (if you believe that they should) is because in some way they represent Israel, and Israel should publicly be seen as not desecrating Shabbos, many would say even at the cost of closing the airline before allowing them to be mechalel shabbat..
Personally I am not so convinced that El Al is representative of Israel, and even if they are that that should really make a difference. El Al is privately held. The fact that some people still think of it as Israel's airline is not the problem of the owners. They should have the ability to make the decision whether or not to fly on Shabbos, without the issue becoming a national issue. El Al does not represent me or you or anyone else. they are a company with a team of owners who are concerned about the bottom line.
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
Labels:
chillul shabbos,
El Al
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Related Posts
"The main reason they would stay with El Al is due to price considerations, and secondary reasons are religious reasons..."
ReplyDeleteWRONG! Price is important, but the main reason that I fly only on El Al is security. How could you not mention in the entire article that El Al's security procedures continue to make them stand out from all other airlines?
good point
DeletePerhaps one of the reasons they're not profitable is the way they treat passengers. Most airlines try to cater to frequent flyers by giving them various perks, while El Al has just increased the point cost of last-minute upgrades by 50%. This on top of making it harder to earn points by reclassifying certain fares as "deep discount" fares that earn much fewer than the previously standard number of points. Nice going, El Al - you've just made this platnium-level Matmid program look elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteIf El Al flies on Shabbat, Haredim and real religious people will not fly in order to avoid the treif. Haredim and real religious people will merely fly connections through Germany or Spain and enjoy cheaper flights with a stopover. To those of us with a short memory, there have been Haredi boycotts in the recent past, and El Al was severely hit for a few weeks. I'm not Haredi but I participated by requesting a non-El Al flight.
ReplyDeleteIsrael's leading financial daily had a survey last week showing El Al to be the most preferred airline of all those operating from Israel. El Al is more expensive and people are willing to fly more expensive for security, for Hebrew speaking staff, for eating 'kosher' without eating from a box, and for direct flights which the other airlines cannot provide.
But despite what people think though, the kitchens are not really kosher certified at all and buyer beware since there are no mashgichim on the plane and absolutely no one to supervise that there are meat and dairy ovens (always order badatz on El Al - it is the same meal wrapped up). On top of that, absolutely no one knows how many times maintenance workers have used the ovens to heat their meals, kosher or not (heard from someone who worked on the planes at night) On the vast majority of other airlines, ordering a kosher meal almost always is default to badatz/glatt food.
Josh
The oven issue is not an issue at all. Airplane ovens get extremely hot under ordinary operating conditions - hot enough, in fact, that they essentially "self-Kasher" within 3-5 minutes. El Al's standard practice is to turn on the ovens for a few minutes before anything goes in - so there's no need for separate Meat and Milk ovens.
DeleteYou can choose to rely on standard El Al Kashrus or not, but don't say that they're not Kosher certified - the Mashgiach does, in fact, give a Hechsher on the food AS SERVED ON THE PLANE. It may not be Mehadrin, but it's definitely Kosher.
Interesting that when it came to taking advantage of EL Al's pricing mistake, no one I know considered it a Jewish airline from a Choshen Mishpat perspective.
ReplyDelete