Did You Really Want Airplane Food?

Posted by: Justin Bachman on August 22

The melee over meals – ie, the lack of them – this week over at United has been a little surprising to me. Each periodic move in U.S. airlines’ race to the bottom these days is greeted in some quarters of the blogosphere as an outrage, further evidence of our civilization’s decline. In case you missed it, United is revamping its policies covering food on board, banishing the biscotti and pretzels on flights of two-to-three hours. In business class, you’ll get sandwiches and salads, the same sold as in coach, and not the better food up front. That’s a huge change, with the greatest potential to truly irk non-first-class-traveling road warriors.

United also will stop serving free meals on flights to Europe from their Washington Dulles hub. That was the decision that caused the most verbiage, including a lengthy piece at USA Today and this fulmination from The Cranky Flier blog. Why?

“Cranky,” aka Brett Snyder, thinks United is displaying its dementia with the stark contrast between advertising a premium travel experience and the cheap, skanky-bus feel onboard. (Our sister publication, Aviation Week, has a roundtable podcast discussion on the topic, if you care for even more.) The pilots also came out to blast the meal plan, calling it a “disastrous business strategy” that will further aggravate passengers. They noted that this is also a way to reduce flight attendant staffing levels to federal minimums. Which it is, naturally.

In a way, this whole debate misses a crucial point: the people running United do not care for the moment about negative press slamming their product. I suspect that on a daily basis these people are fighting to keep the whole shebang from collapsing under the weight of its own dysfunction. Jet fuel prices are no picnic, the pilots are on the warpath, and absolutely no one wants to own this company in its current form. Do you really think they’re exercised about whether to serve lukewarm chicken breast on the way to Amsterdam?

It’s interesting however that United keeps stressing that this new program of food sales is purely a test, subject to revision. Again Thursday, a company statement quoted a United official saying that “We are listening to our customers as we test new options in both the business and economy cabins.” In other words, holler loud enough – and book away – and United may return the warm food. But here’s the larger point: Do you really care about food on the plane, be it warm, cold, pricey or gratis? (Please drop me a line on this.) A meal may be a sign of a certain level of semi-tolerable travel experience and its loss representative of further degradation of former service levels. OK, I’ll grant that. But the Asian and European carriers already put U.S. airline meals to shame. I’m just not sure that, on its face, the loss of a free meal means all that much.