American Airlines is rolling out a new afternoon tea service in all cabins on flights from London and Paris to the United States. This is a test and it’s not yet clear when it will end, but looks promising.
- Business and first class: finger sandwiches, scones, jam and clotted cream with a Victoria sponge cake and fresh fruit.
- Premium economy: scone, finger sandwiches, clotted cream, jam and fresh fruit.
- Economy: scone, finger sandwiches, clotted cream and jam.
Credit: American Airlines
Afternoon tea replaces the cold option for second meal service. The hot option will continue to be offered. And a spokesperson tells me that this is “a test and our team will collect customer feedback throughout.”
Here’s a business class tea offering on American’s joint venture partner British Airways.
And here’s a first class tea offering,
I’m actually booked to fly American out of London Heathrow this summer and hopefully this test will still be in place. I would love to try it – more so if they’d borrow some of the actual tea from their partner BA.
Also included in American’s announcement is an addition to food options for sale in coach on domestic flights. A real shortcoming of the airline’s domestic product has been their buy onboard offering.
While airlines like United and Alaska offer significant choices, including hot options, American has very little food for sale in economy and offers it on very few flights. Most of the airlines passengers are domestic coach passengers, and legacy America West Airlines (which took over American) pioneered selling food instead of serving complimentary meals to economy passengers.
American has updated their food for sale offerings with a Tostitos Snack Box:
- Tostitos Bite Sized Rounds
- Tostitos Chunky Salsa
It’s only on flights over 1,300 miles, and at a charge of $9 or 900 miles. Incidentally, low cost carrier Allegiant sells Tostitos crispy rounds – with your choice of salsa or nacho cheese dip for just $8.
This just doesn’t cut it, and by the way there’s rarely enough loaded onto flights to be available to passengers who want to buy them – at least the flights I’m on.
This is doubly problematic because a complimentary snack in economy is supposed to be a benefit of Executive Platinum and ConciergeKey status, and a statement credit to spend for onboard snacks is supposed to be a benefit of the Barclays Aviator Silver AAdvantage co-brand credit card. So I hope this isn’t the revamp of the onboard food for sale program that we’ve been expecting.
Nice to see one of the legacies try something new to differentiate it’s product. It’s small, but in a sea of uniformity, I appreciate it. Now, AA needs to change it’s menu in J. I have been eating the same chicken or short ribs for over week a year now.
Yep, the Kid is old … in the mid 80’s American served scones with clotted cream in the front cabin from Manchester to Chicago. Gary, check my memory, that was the first US to Britain route AA had, Flight 64. I flew it almost every month.
Enjoy the lipton lemon tea! Lol
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! I love tea sandwiches. ( I also carry my own teas. Yum.
@HD,
I flew MAN out of ORD from 1990-1997 and out of JFK 2000-2018. ORD had 3 flights a day and JFK had 2 back in the day. When AA got the LHR routes in 1991, it started to reduce service to MAN, less frequency and smaller gauge. Such a great town, lots of friends in the area still to this day. After UA and DL came in, and AA had LHR, it eroded down to 1 757 a day from JFK. Now no US carrier serves it. Such a shame.
Delta currently offers an afternoon tea service currently out of LHR as one of the options for its pre-arrival meal service to the U.S. Similar offering to AA..and in unique. They also use to do a beef ploughmans plate as well which I quite liked.
Brilliant! Oh, the irony of bringing back something so traditional as ‘innovation.’ I’ve always enjoyed selecting the ‘afternoon tea’ with QR when offered. It’s a nice pick-me-up on long-haul.
@Brian W — Hey, don’t knock those short-ribs. Even daily, it’s still a delight. Remember, we could be stuck in the back, lucky to have a mere Biscoff. Let’s show a little gratitude, good sir.
@1990. AA used to offer the little filet steaks. I enjoyed those. AA just needs to change the steak and chicken offering a little bit. They have a large pre order menu for people who request specialty diet meals, but not much for those who just want a little change of thr standard meal. If you fly them often in J, it becomes repetitive quickly. To be fair to AA, I do enjoy their A321T service.
@ Gary — This should be interesting. It’s is easy to imagine AA failing in the executuon of this service.