"Why do airlines persist in serving us in-flight meals? "
 

Their journalist clearly flies on the wrong airline. Some have surprisingly good meals, given the constraints (although yes, in some cases the in-flight magazine would probably be better). I don't see the point on a short flight, but when you're going long-haul, it's probably easier for them to serve food because then people won't be trying to bring their own and add unknown extra weight to the aircraft, not to mention the issues of disposing of the residual food if the destination doesn't allow it to be imported.

Another pointless article by Simon Calder who in his own article answers his own question.

Mr Calder must have had a bad flight where the food was rubbish and therefore he took 'pen to paper' hence the article. He would be better suited to writing an article on why airlines charge exorbitant fares during UK half term holidays.

He obviously agrees. :O

An e-petition against holiday price hikes in the school breaks has attracted more than 140,000 signatures - but will it change things? - News & Advice - Travel - The Independent

Supply and demand?

Well, regulation of airfares is no longer in the powers of the CAA or any EU member state. And good thing with people asking for silly things like this.

Far better to have the schools be in session 12 months of the year and to let parents and teachers choose when to take their vacations just like in business. No doubt you would still have peak pricing at Christmas or Easter, for example, but not everyone would choose to go then. Forcing everyone to go at the same time causes peak pricing.

Or they could stagger the holidays county buy county, like the French/Swiss do and smooth out the peaks.

Not really, because they do not.

You just get discounted flight prices during the school term.

Its easy to work this out as if the companies did charge the discounted price all year round they would go out of business, and so its the 'school term' price which is closer to the real price.

My complaint about airline meals is not the blandness - but when they, literally, spice them up. They want to make them more tasty at Fl360 and think that adding spices is the way to go. A few years ago on VS in PE, I could not eat any of the meals due to spices.

The CC asked why I had not ordered a special meal and I said that I was not a vegetarian, nor was I intolerant of lactose etc. but I was intolerant of spices. The head CC arrived (very polite) and I explained that in all my years of paxing this was the first time I had been asked to choose from a menu that contained nothing I could eat. She brought me the Upper menu and told me what was surplus and I had a good meal. So bland might not be such a bad idea.

I think Mr Calder (the journo) is running out of things to write about.

On the thread drift topic of school holidays, I was discussing this last night with friends who have x2 at school:
"We are told not to take our children out of school. The govt just took a teacher out of school for jury duty for up to one month. The pupils will now have supply teachers and others. So the govt has disrrupted 30 pupils in one go. Result? :hmm:"

The Government has nothing to with the selection of jurors. The idea is juries are made of a cross section of society so inevitably some teachers will end up serving on a jury, just as there will be taxi drivers, hair dressers, actors etc etc on juries.

There is also a bit of difference between the needs of a fair legal system to have a balance of individuals on a jury, on what could be a court case of some real importance to several individuals, compared with a parents desire to take their kids to Torremolinos for a week in the sun and avoid paying the market price - even if times 30.

Back to meals
 

If you don't like the in-flight meal don't eat it. I understand the constraints and I appreciate the legacy carriers offering a meal. I never complained about the quality/ quantity of the food. And I do hope it is going to be maintained in short flights (intra European ones) and having the option to choose the ones offering a flight.

And once a time I got a second meal and it was great.

Please expand on this! I can't remember the last time that I had a "surprisingly good meal" on an aircraft.

The only reason, as far as I can tell, for the dinner service is to interrupt your sleep with noxious fumes / in-flight entertainment watching with constant interruptions from crew.

The last flight I was on (16 hours on Qantas) it was so bad, for both meals, that the smell woke my daughter up and caused frequent trips to and from the loos to dispose of sick bags (hers, but I would feel the same were I not so used to the stench by now).

Perhaps because they can sell enough at full price, without having to discount them to sell?

So it can give you some alcohol too, to keep you quiet for most of the flight.

And because 12 hours is a long time to expect people to go without food (or at least a pale imitation of food in economy).

Would she be better off if half the passengers had brought bags of McDonalds' 'meals' with them?

What I wonder is why, every time I fly Business Class, they seem to have some kind of seafood component in the meal. My girlfriend is allergic to pretty much all kinds of seafood, so she'd be in trouble if she was up front with me.

Well I actually enjoy the meals mostly. Plus no one is exactly force feeding anyone to eat them. Considering many airlines charge for meals the whole article is a bit of a moot point

Surely the best option is to have simple microwavable food available. If you are hungry and want to eat then you pop up to a servery, take something out of the fridge, stick it in the microwave for the requisite time (easily done with, say, a barcode on the meal and barcode reader to operate the microwave) and bring it back on a tray to eat.

Then you clear up by taking the tray back and binning the remnants in the same way as you do at McDonalds.

That way you don't end up with the ovens stinking the cabin out, then everybody eating at once further stinking the cabin out, and then waiting ages after everyone has finished eating before your trays get cleared away.

But then I have never understood the need to eat on a plane. No flights are longer than 16 hours or so and that is easily manageable by a meal at the airport beforehand and a light snack on the plane. Why would anybody want to eat terrible food on the plane?

"Well I actually enjoy the meals mostly."

+ 1


Most people couldn't go 16 hours without food, even with a meal beforehand
and a snack during.

Virgin Atlantic meals are pretty good, I guess you've not flown with them recently. I wasn't impressed with United's offering as the other airline I've used in the past few months.

Do airlines have microwave ovens on their aircraft? I thought not, but not sure the reason why. (besides they probably are not useful heating a couple hundred meals at a time)

Well BA certainly do in First and Club World. Believe it or not they had them on 747 'classics' back in the 1970's.

Well I guess some people have low standards. :E

By and large, airline meals are revolting. They are mass-produced, heavily-processed pap.

CX J class meals in the mid to late 80's were magnificent! QF J class a few years ago I had a superb steak LAX-BNE.....but not in the class of CX stuff in an earlier time...

I still fondly remember Y class CX flights between HKG & Europe, and every Y class pax being offered little glasses of cognac after the meal service, so very refined and ever so enjoyable....

I think the reason for no large scale installation of Microwaves is weight. Also, the existing system of cokk/chill/reheat has been around for a long time and is used around the globe. For a carrier to introduce a new way of doing meals? Problems and cost from the ordering of the machine, till selling it on.

It will be much cheaper to stay with the status quo and fiddle at the edges for Y. Simpler to alter for C + F. Which is why we've seen the lounge menu leap forward to solve the problem.

Well the last time I flew long-haul it was CX LHR-HKG then a 1hr connection to HKG-CEB.

Had CX not been serving airline meals (and bl00dy excellent Cantonese meals they were) then where the hell would I have eaten during my 17 or so hours of travelling?

Hi vctenderness,

There is only 1 onboard, which is in the Club World galley. The galley operator from First will come and use it occasionally, usually only for making scrambled egg for breakfast.

I am wondering how much would cost to have a decent meal in a intra European flight. I am willing to pay something in the region of 10 € for the sake of a decent meal like the ones in the 90's.

I expect given economies of scale, you're probably not far off in terms additional cost to improve quality.

I certainly suspect the current target price point given to the caterers by the airlines is far below 10EUR.... at least certainly for Economy and Business, they might stretch a little more for First, but not much. Catering is another expense for the airlines, but unlike stuff like fuel its easier to beat down your suppliers for cost savings on food. :E

As vctenderness stated they certainly on the 747 100s. They were always used in 1st class and would annoy the passengers when crew used to slam the door shut especially after manually whipping a tray of eggs and scrambeling them. The black cherry ice cream which used to be stowed in a dry ice box always got defrosted before service, unless the galley girl forgot about it and when the door opened it poured out like a purple river :D

Travelling First Class with BA back in the early 90s was great for food and wine.
Some of the Cabin Crew turned the service of food and wine in to a First Class show.
Both watching the Performance, and eating the food was brilliant entertainment.

Starter with a decent Montrachet, Beef with Lynch-Bages, and puds with Drambuie, all served just like they do at Le Manoir.
Brilliant.

The seats, though, those great big light grey things, were awful.
The pyjamas were great.

On the leg down to OZ, I particularly liked the way the CSD would scoop the yogurt out of the pot and into a white bowl for breakfast and then add some strawberries and chocolate flake on top. One in particular seemed quite shocked when I refused Bucks Fizz at 5am prior to landing in Sydney...

I recall reading that one US carrier saved a fortune by removing one Olive from each salad. Across a year? Imagine how much they can save by removing 2g of this a stick of that?

Unfortuantely, in this second great depression, the greatest majority of folks only look at the bottom line ticket price and many others have no say as the company has negotiated a bulk deal - which is much lower than the rack rate.

That's why the lounges turned into restaurants, much cheaper to do better food there, than on board for C+F.

When I was talking about 10 € I should have made clear of willing to pay 10 € more in my regular airline in exchange for better food.

Indeed Rwy in Sight, your meaning did come across. But those that think the same as you (and me) as a percentage of the pax??? :(

Reportedly attributed to Bob Crandall, one-time Chairman/President of American Airlines. He was the ultimate bean-counter and I've heard various estimates of the predicted saving, ranging from US$40K to US$0.5m per year (the latter is a bit hard to believe).

I had the pleasure of hearing him talk at a RAeS branch meeting many years ago when he walked into the lion's den at BA's Heathrow HQ (there was an all-out war between the two airlines in those days). Very entertaining speaker.

He didn't mention olives, though, :O

There was a story circulating back in the 80's that the Britannia beancounters had figured out they could save X amount in fuel per annum by no longer serving a large orange with their meals.

DaveReidUK,

"BA's Heathrow HQ (there was an all-out war between the two airlines in those days)"

That should have been a very long time ago because I still remember the "No way BA/AA" of a red carrier.

Anyway is the olive story true or is it an urban legend?

Because people constantly walking around the cabin isn't going to hinder the FA's as well as annoy other passengers. Not to mention queues for the microwaves. Plus how many meals do you take? What if some greedy guts has 4 or 5? How would such a thing be policed so to speak.

Personally I've never had a problem asking FA's for a drink or snack if they don't happen to be doing a service at the time. Meals have come a long way recently and I can't think of one bad meal in recent years. That is 'good for a plane meal', which can't really be compared to restaurant cuisine so enough of the allegations that I clearly don't know good food.

There is good and bad.
 

On occasions, travelling out of London City, I have connected with an Edelweiss flight in Switzerland. The tray meals they serve have always been appetising - and far superior to those served by their parent company, Swiss.

The worst meal was on a charter out of Gatwick with a company I fortunately cannot remember. The odour of reheated roast lamb, dowsed in vinegary mint sauce was enough to push the whole tray away!

BA used to run a scheme for staff whereby if you suggested some thing to save money they would investigate and if plausible you would get a share of savings.

I had noticed that out of London they were bulk loading bread rolls and placing a bread roll on the tray. I suggested they remove the one on the tray.

I received quite a good cash payment and the choice of a sizeable gift from a catalogue for my idea.

They worked out the cost of the bread plus the cost of placing it on the tray as each item had a 'cost' to perform this.

So I'm sure the olive story is true.