3 Companies With Terrible Policies On When It’s OK to Say ‘Gay,’ ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Fag’

CONTINENTAL AIRLINES (Market Cap: $1.47 billion)

Continental is America’s fourth largest carrier and employs more than 43,000 people. We’ve enjoyed many a delayed flight in their reasonable Presidents Club lounges. The Human Rights Campaign says Continental is one of the best places to work; Delta did not make that same list. The airline even signed up as a corporate sponsor for Cleveland’s bid for the 2014 Gay Games.

So how come the airline has (had?) a bizarre filter in place for users searching for gay travel on its website?

Continental employs one of those automated service bots called Ask Alice, which responds to customer queries by checking its database against any questions you might have. (Here’s the link, though it will force a resize of your browser window.) Except when Queerty reader Jeff asked Alice about gay travel options, he was told to keep it clean. Here’s what Jeff says he inputted (and received back) last week:

You Asked: GLBT travel?
Alex: Hey, let’s keep this clean. Is there something about Continental that I can help you with?

As Jeff notes: “This is the same response that you get for such postings as: ‘fuck you’ [and] ‘you suck.’”

That’s not exactly the customer service we were after! When we received Jeff’s email last week, we tried our own questions, even making the sentence more clear: “Do you have any gay travel options?” We received the same response: “Hey, let’s keep this clean.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t grab screenshots at the time — but it appears Continental has updated their system. Here are the replies we received today:

And when we asked “Any travel tips for fags?,” we were told:

(And yes, Alice replaced the word “fag.”)

Admirable that Continental removed “gay” and “lesbian” from its curse words dictionary. But, uh, we’re still not entirely satisfied. Shouldn’t a giant airline be able to recommend some gay travel hotspots?