Flight Centre is under fire in New Zealand for what a major media outlet there has called “a booze-soaked culture and murals that suggest women should carry condoms and become ‘Naughtywise’ ambassadors at the company’s leading global event”.
Leading New Zealand online news website Stuff.co.nz yesterday ran a major story attacking what it said was Flight Centre’s vision of a high-achieving employee, as depicted on a poster in its Auckland office – “a scantily clad woman with her skirt hitched up, one shoe missing, holding a glass of champagne and wearing a pair of devil’s horns”.
A male equivalent of the poster showed a man clutching a beer bottle.
The story said the questionable wall art was installed as part of a recent refurbishment of the company’s Auckland headquarters.
It quoted Flight Centre chief financial officer Victoria Courtney defending the murals, saying they were a “tongue in cheek” reference to the company’s “work-hard, party-hard” culture.
One of the contentious posters
Stuff.co.nz says its reporters were approached by a Flight Centre employee, who felt “compelled to speak out about the Flight Centre culture”. The news site has asked anyone who feels they have more information on the subject to contact it. The story can be read online, or watched on video, on the Stuff.co.nz website here.
Some readers might think Flight Centre has gone too far in New Zealand. Others might feel the Stuff.co.nz story makes too much of what’s essentially a bit of light-hearted fun.
Stuff.co.nz has a big readership. The New Zealand news website is published by Fairfax Digital, a division of Fairfax New Zealand Ltd which is in turn a subsidiary of Fairfax in Australia. It hosts the websites for Fairfax’s New Zealand newspapers, including New Zealand’s second- and third-highest circulation daily newspapers, The Dominion Post and The Press, and the highest circulation weekly, The Sunday Star-Times.
Written by Peter Needham
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Simple question. If you were hiring and the person said i worked at ‘Flight Centre’, here is my CV and a picture of me in the workplace (insert poster), would you hire her? Actions speak louder than words.
Simple question. If you were hiring and the person said i worked at ‘Flight Centre’, here is my CV and a picture of me in the workplace (insert poster), would you hire her? Actions speak louder than words.