Tag Archives for inflight meals.
I’m a frequent critic of American Airlines but I was very impressed with their domestic catering earlier this week. I wrote separately about breakfast on a 1500 mile flight. I’m now returning to talk about dinner on the way back. It was an improvement over what American Airlines was serving pre-pandemic.
I’m genuinely thrilled to know that I won’t go hungry on a flight if I don’t have time to eat running to the airport or running between connections.
Real meals are back in American Airlines first class which is to say we no longer suffer from shrink-wrapped turkey or pimiento cheese sandwiches.
Earlier in the month hot meals returned to first class on flights of 1500 miles or longer. The roll out went surprisingly smoothly. And now meals – albeit a charcuterie plate or vegetarian sandwich on pretzel croissant at lunch – are returning to flights 900-1499 miles in distance. American is choosing to focus on the dessert.
American Airlines has only been offering hot meals in premium cabins on cross country flights and international flights of sufficient distance. However in a sign that nature is healing, they’ll begin returning meal service to domestic first class cabins next week – Wednesday, February 16.
As American Airlines prepares to bring real meals back to domestic first class, they’re having supply chain issues even catering the products they currently offer customers on board.
We were supposed to see improvements this fall. They put their boxed meals on trays to prepare for the return. And while pilots have started seeing hot meals, customers on domestic flights – other than premium cross country flights – have not.
But that, apparently, is about to finally change.
Passengers on a Uganda Airlines flight from Entebbe to Dubai have been arrested for turning the trip into a bazaar on Friday, charged with ‘common nuisance.’ Two individuals, who normally hawk cell phone accessories, brought grasshoppers on board to sell to other passengers to eat (“Nsenene”). They were up in the aisles of the Airbus A330, and apparently found some willing buyers.
The grasshoppers were allowed onto the aircraft because they were fried. However the airline has said if the two passengers Mubiru Paul and Kiggundu Habib do it again they’ll be banned from the state-owned carrier. And the airline itself has now gotten the idea to offer the grasshoppers as part of inflight meals themselves. Competition works.
Singapore Airlines sweats all the small details, not just the mechanical ones. They built a model Airbus A380 using manila envelopes and the seats inside the plane even reclined. Tag line: “It’s the small details that make giants in the sky.” Bingo.
Which brings me to meal service on American Airlines.
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.
It looks like this is all finally starting to come together.
Dear American Airlines, I realize that you’re based in Dallas, and top management moved there from Tempe, Arizona. So it’s understandable that you might be confused. So I wanted to share with you in unequivocal terms: this is not what a bagel is.
At an American Airlines employee question and answer session last week, a flight attendant asked airline President Robert Isom about customers booking away from the airline because of its inferior international premium cabin inflight product compared to its partners.
American isn’t just bringing back business class lounges and first class dining. Better inflight meals are coming soon. And the airline’s President promised a surprising standard to hold them to going forward.
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 »
