June 24th, 2022, Stephan Shakespeare
Earlier this month, Jet2 CEO Steve Heapy reportedly criticised “lazy Brits who live off benefits and sit on their arses” in the wake of nationwide staff shortages. Heapy is alleged to have said that homegrown job candidates failed to take the company’s application process seriously. Not the most obvious recruitment messaging, and data from YouGov BrandIndex shows that (amid chaos across the nation’s airports) the company looks to have suffered for it.
Jet2holidays, the firm’s vacation arm (and the second-largest package operator in the UK over the last six months, according to our data), saw Buzz scores (which track whether consumers have heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the past fortnight), fall from 7.1 to -4.9 (-12) between June 2 and June 12. At a time when several brands in the sector are experiencing negative headlines, Jet2holidays is doing even worse: the average score for all travel companies that we track is -0.4 over the same period.
Beyond headlines, Impression scores, which measure general positive and negative sentiment, nosedived from 20.2 to 3.9 (-16.3) once the story broke. For an agency that was well-liked relative to the rest of the sector (where scores are 4.7 on average), it’s a large amount of goodwill to lose in a little time.
Jet2Holidays’ Reputation metric, which measures whether people would be proud or embarrassed to work for a brand, also took a blow, declining from 12.2 to -1.8 (-14) over the same 10-day period. Recommendation deteriorated from 18.5 to 6.9 (-11.6), and Consideration (a measure of whether consumers would think about choosing a brand from a list of providers) crept down from 24.3 to 17.1.
Jet2 has denied that Heapy made the comments. Whether they have been reported accurately or misinterpreted, there is seldom a good time to criticise the work ethic of your home nation’s workforce. Loose lips sink ships, they say; but they may also ground planes.