Building a cohesive culture across over 20 bases and 100 destinations in Europe, North Africa, and the Near East presents an enormous challenge. One of Vueling's greatest strengths—its expansive network and status as a multinational airline—is also challenging when engaging and supporting its crews. Each country, and often each region, has unique languages, cultural expectations, labor laws, and operational nuances. Even within Spain, where Vueling is based, the needs and cultures of different bases can vary drastically. Vueling understood that they needed to prioritize cabin crew engagement to create a unified company capable of providing a great customer experience.
Cabin crews play a crucial customer-facing role as Vueling's public face. However, frontline staff reported feeling disengaged. To understand and address this disconnect, Vueling teamed up with Other Tomorrows to conduct in-depth qualitative research. The goal was to create a framework that supports cultural transformation while uniting Vueling's cabin crew with the rest of the organization under a shared vision across its bases and destinations. Our team traveled across Europe to interview over 100 stakeholders, customers, and cabin crew members at 7 Vueling bases across Spain, France, and Italy. To ensure we captured local nuances, half the team conducted research in English, and the other half conducted interviews in Spanish to capture every detail and insight. To immerse ourselves in the vibrant cultures of these destinations—and of Vueling—we embraced local nuances and, naturally, savored plenty of jamón along the way.
-Cabin Crew Member, Rome
During our interviews, we heard the word cercanía repeated over and over. Cercanía is the Spanish word for closeness in English and prossimità in Italian. This feeling captured a desire for genuine connections and a sense of belonging formed through social bonds. To them, real engagement means fostering cercanía through nurturing relationships. Cultivating this type of engagement requires a mindset shift away from viewing engagement as a quantifiable KPI on a spreadsheet, focusing instead on helping cabin crew feel seen, recognized, and empowered inside and outside the plane.
Improving the customer experience—a key way for airlines to differentiate themselves—starts by improving the employee experience for cabin crews. We heard that when Vueling values and supports its crews, they feel empowered to go above and beyond in delivering exceptional customer service and hospitality. Focusing on improving crews' training, policies, and growth opportunities supports their day-to-day roles and improves their overall well-being.
Employee engagement is shaped not only by changes made today but also by the opportunities we create for tomorrow. We identified growth and recognition as key drivers of engagement, inspiring crew members to envision their potential and pursue alternative growth paths at Vueling. Whether for a crew member at the start of their career or for an experienced veteran, intentional recognition of great work and fostering a growth mindset are essential for employees to feel valued by Vueling and want to keep growing at the company throughout their careers.
-Cabin Crew Member, Málaga
Cabin crew needs evolve over time. By identifying patterns in their behaviors, values, and core needs and understanding how these needs shift throughout their careers, we discovered that engagement is much like a relationship—it is seeded, nurtured, and sustained through a strong sense of belonging.
Connecting themes we uncovered during research to Vueling's priorities, we crafted a strategy playbook with over 20 envisioned concepts to engage crews and foster closeness. The team mapped the crew member experience to illustrate the ideal-state journey of crew members at Vueling. Together, Other Tomorrows and Vueling evolved and prioritized these ideas to create a roadmap for implementation.
A key element of introducing new policies and initiatives is determining a way to measure the company's progress in implementing them. So, in addition to the concepts and journey map, we created a holistic progress measuring system that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data. This system included actively collected insights, passively gathered operational data, and observations from leaders during in-flight experiences and day-to-day interactions with management.
We are excited to keep collaborating with Vueling to implement the frameworks and concepts that emerged from this work.
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Other Tomorrows
Jen Ashman-Stauss
Nicole Nassif
Kyle Wing
Hannah Oh
María Risueño
Lee Moreau
Vueling Core Team
Miguel Abadía
Caina Soares
