Travel Weekly Blog

The Telegraph flags up misbehaviour in a Facebook group for London Gatwick Ground Staff, whose members allegedly:

• Described passengers as 'smelly and annoying'
• Ridiculed 'silly American accents'
• Complained about passengers who put boarding passes in their mouths (What?!? I hope none of my readers do that.)

We all know that customer-facing staff are more human than their job allows them to let on, but this is mean-spirited stuff - particularly the comments about accents. BA will want to investigate.

What chance do the employees have? Roughly none. They were posting in a closed group, but it's naive to think that gives you real privacy, let alone a legal defence - 'I'm not even sure there is a private place on the internet web,' as travel tech blogger Alex Bainbridge says in his post on the subject.

So it's a case of bringing the company into disrepute, and the last time that happened to an airline - in the recent and virtually identical Virgin/Facebook/'Chavs' case - 13 staff lost their jobs.

Update: More on this from TW columnist Simon Calder, who argues in the Independent that the employees' gripes were justified. 

I think some probably were - like me, he's appalled by the idea of handing staff a 'saliva-sodden boarding pass' - but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to make them on Facebook.

PS: In the time it has taken me to write this post, all members and admins of the group have left it.