Wow: “Service Dog” Gulps Down United Airlines Meal In First Class [Roundup]

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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

  1. Putting a service dog vest on a dog that is not a true service animal is not much different than putting on an arm sling to get preferential boarding. As for the dog eating a first class meal, this is a first class dog so of course it deserves a first class meal with it’s mouth having less germs than a human mouth. Kind of like a premium airline for premium passengers.

  2. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet. I’m sure United would like you to believe the dog would eat their food, but even Rover would reject their poor offerings.

  3. Much of why restaurant and cafe food (including coffee) tastes better than food prepped at home (well, maybe except for your home, Gary, based on your recent comments haha) simply comes down to a matter of throughput. Ingredient inventory turning over with high velocity, batch prepping for same-day or next-day use, flat-tops, ovens, and water boilers that hold precise temperature and are always running, all of these add up to create economies of scale that also improve quality.

    In the case of coffee this is particularly true because even the most prolific of home coffee drinkers buying the most reasonable quantity of beans and storing them as carefully as possible is still likely to see degradation in the input product well beyond what a cafe would experience (especially if the coffee shop roasts on site – I think you mean “freshly roasted” in your article).

  4. Ahhh…. But did the dog pay for the first class seat? Wasn’t there recently a whole pooh-bah about FAs giving first class food to other passengers “because they hadn’t paid for it”?

    So, it’s OK for a FA to give a DOG first class food, but not OK for an FA to give the same food to a high-level medallion status passenger in coach?

    Same with the seat. Did the dog (or owner) pay for TWO first class seats? If not, then is it OK to an FA to let a non-paying DOG sit in a first class seat they didn’t pay for, but not OK for an FA to let a paying passenger in coach sit in an empty first class seat?

    Are airlines treating dogs better than their paying passengers?

  5. Who’s a good boy?

    Anyone that bitches about feeding a dog an unused extra plate is an asshat.

  6. I travel with my TRAINED service dog and I travel by my Suburban. Should the need to return home quickly arise I would buy two first class seats, as the man may have done, and my service dog would be ON THE FLOOR AS REQUIRED BY MOST AIRLINES and next to the window, NOT on the seat. I find it unacceptable that many owners/handlers will treat the airline, restaurant, grocery store and public laws for sanitation and health requirements as “rules for thee but not for me.” Not following guidelines and rules for REAL service dogs scream FAKE.

  7. What’s the “wow” for in the headline? It makes it sound as though the dog consumed someone else’s meal when in fact it apparently politely just consumed the meal it was offered. I know this most likely wasn’t a real service dog but I wish airlines would just sell a seat for the dog if people want to travel with them.

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