Hot Meals And Pre-Order Choices Returning To American Airlines Domestic First Class

by Gary Leff

American Airlines has been promising that it would bring back hot meals to domestic first class. The timeline for this has been fall 2021, with a slow rollout across various routes blamed on supply chain challenges.

When they started putting cold boxed meals on trays, that was less about the notion that trays made for a nicer experience (though it actually does) and more about getting the trays onto aircraft as they tried to manage the process. It looks like this is all finally starting to come together, as caught by eagle-eyed aviation watchdog JonNYC:

Not only are there meal choices – including a hot item, and where cold no longer being limited to shrink-wrapped turkey sandwiches or turkey croissants – appearing on some routes, but pre-order options are being advertised as well so that customers can pre-select in order to have their first choice.

The meals, though, do not actually show up on the tray looking like they do here from the website. Nonetheless this is great progress and I’m looking forward to trying the food again, and not just accepting the meal to photograph the sheer audacity of it.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  2. Thank you, American Airlines, for planning on restoring meal service during some long-distance flights.

  3. Catering is no different than alot of other things in the US economy right now: promised but not able to be delivered. Airline catering personnel are paid less than airline employees and even airlines cannot properly staff their operations. Nice food is great but if a flight doesn’t operate or operates so late that the food is not safe to consume, then food doesn’t really matter as much as running the basic operation well.
    We all want the world we used to know to return but there are things that have to happen in sequence. Americans indicated yesterday, among other things, that they aren’t happy with the state of the economy including access to products and services

  4. I was hoping for something better than hotel food. Actually, though, the AA dependability needs to get a lot better before I fly it. I’m not really that loyal, and need to fly WAS-AUS, which is one of those rare destinations that AA, Southwest and UA all fly direct. For dependability alone, I have bought UA in F. (Seems weird to say that, though. It wasn’t all that many years ago it was UA that was cancelling for MX left and right. I used to work in an extra travel day for going TPAC on business to account for cancellations.)

  5. What’s the minimum flight length for a hot meal? Is it flight time (e.g. 2 hours), is it miles (e.g. 1000)? Don’t see it on the AA site.

  6. This is actually very excited and probably the only redeeming character AA can have considering their unprofessional and rude flight attendants in the past year

  9. Isn’t it audacious that Gary dwells on hot meal availability and offerings on American , while on Siuthwest crews are fighting each other and make political statements to captive passengers.

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