Tag Archives for wine.
American Airlines will unveil a new champagne next week while also preparing long-overdue improvements to its notoriously bad coffee, part of its push to win back premium flyers.
Starting January 1, 2025, United will introduce Laurent-Perrier La Cuvée champagne in Polaris business class along with 3 additional new wines: Freemark Abbey cabernet, E. Guigal Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and Luca ‘G Lot’ chardonnay.
It really elevated this passenger’s business class experience when a United Airlines flight attendant create a makeshift ‘ice bucket’ to keep their champagne chilled on a transatlantic flight.
JetBlue does a really nice job with their onboard soft product. Maybe too nice of a job, considering they don’t seem to be earning a revenue premium on their transatlantic flights.
They’re promoting new meals and amenity kits. The meals seem good enough, the amenity kits interesting (especially with American Airlines handing out cardboard boxes), but what is really striking to me is the wine that they’re hardly even promoting.
Air France does a nice job generally selecting its business class wines. Their customers expect it. But budgets are still constrained in business class, both in the air and on the ground.
So I was shocked when a reader spotted a single bottle of 2011 Chateau Branaire Ducru St. Julien in their Paris Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2E Hall M business lounge. Wow. It turned out to be the last or only bottle they had, and he finished it off for them.
Printed wine lists are out in American Airlines long haul premium cabins. Instead of a menu listing options, the printed meal menu given to business class passengers now says “We invite you to engage with our flight attendants to learn more about the selection of wines available for your enjoyment.”
Flight attendants, of course, have been given no extra training on the wines being offered. You can ask, and maybe they’ll show you the bottle.
American Airlines no longer serves champagne in its long haul business class, offering only Italian sparkling wine Ferrari Brut TrentoDOC from Trentino, which is decidedly mid.
A woman and her mother are suing Delta Air Lines after they say that a man seated in their row on an international flight from New York JFK to Athens was served ten vodka drinks and a glass of wine – before harassing and sexually touching them. Flight attendants blew off their pleas, according to the women, and didn’t even report the incident to authorities. The daughter was sixteen. Eventually they were each awarded 5,000 SkyMiles.
Interesting in U.S. law you cannot protect the recipe for wine. You can only have intellectual property in its packaging. If the wine tastes identical, then customers are really getting what they expected right? And it’s just the famous brand that isn’t making profit off of it.
If you look at once high quality brands that have been acquired and watered down their products… think Tumi in luggage, Dom Perignon in champagne (not every vintage should be released, and once wouldn’t have been!)… then the brand is actually what’s lying, communicating to consumers a quality that turns out not to be delivered.
A reader recently flew Delta Air Lines business class from London Heathrow, and snapped photos of the wines being offered. I was appalled. The white was actually the same one being served in economy. It was a $5 Hidden Creek 2018 white blend. If the flight were still on the ground in the EU I believe it would legally have to be marketed as ‘table wine’.
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 »
