akcae

No, but I'm guessing their catering planning process hasn't caught up with the free-meal-to-EXPs benefit. Left hand/right hand thing, not unusual for large corporations.

arlflyer

Sure, coulda been a catering error. I was just saying that a high elite load probably didn't help things. No excuse indeed.

I'd also guess that AA does err on the side of under-catering because whatever margin they forgo on some lost sales probably is less than what they lose if they waste an item.


Another sound point. Anecdotally, it even seems that there are some FAs still unaware of the benefit.

enviroian

People were hungry and pissed. We were over 1.5 hours late first because we were waiting for our pilot to arrive from CLT and then because EWR wouldn't let us leave.

On top of that the lavs were inop on the ground and the pilot announced they would only work > 16K feet exasperated the problem when row 4 wanted something to eat the frustrated FA said sorry only chips and trail mix.

bridge29

Crap, sorry folks, I had only remembered doing this on pmUS flights and looks like it doesn't exist anymore. It'd be nice of AA would consider re-implementing this.

http://lechicgeek.boardingarea.com/u...t-to-everyone/

Jeanne23

Yup, it was a US only program that never moved over during the merger.

It's a shame because it was really effective. I never had a mistake with one of my orders and it looked like a lot of people were starting to take advantage of it.

on-a-stick

My brother used to fly US and he told me everyone on his row on a flight two years ago had ordered a BOB meal in advance. Pretty impressive.

Given that AA is moving back to complimentary snacks I don't expect them to have much of a BOB offering, nor to invest in the very simple process of online ordering.

This is why I pack my own lunch whenever it's feasible.

transportbiz

Agreed, this leaving revenue on the table is the most perplexing of all things with BoB stocking on all flights, not just AA. I've had VX, AS, UA, AA, DL all run out of BoB early on. With all the nickel and diming the airlines to, I've never understood how they miss this opportunity so often.

akcae

DL never discontinued free snacks of peanuts, pretzels, or cookies, yet has an extensive BOB menu on long(ish) flights. If one is hungry and has a 3hr flight, a pack of peanuts won't go very far. Not having BOB food is, as stated above, leaving money on the table (or in the air, as it were).

metallo

I was #2 on the UPG list, and only #1 cleared the other night, so I found myself in Row 7 (Y bulkhead) of an older LAA 738. This was a dinner flight in First. Complimentary BOB items weren't offered to me at first, but when I asked for an alcoholic drink, I wasn't charged. A snack/meal also was not offered, so after receiving my drink, I asked what was available. All options listed on the marketplace menu were available, and I selected the Turkey Cuban. The FA provided it free of charge and never asked for my EXP card. His tablet obviously showed my status, so it would be nice for the service to be offered proactively.

After the flight attendant handed me my meal, the purser poked her head through the curtain and asked the FA serving me whether he had any more Turkey Cubans, because one of the pilots wanted one. The other FA turned and said, "I already gave him one, and I only have a few left. I'll see what I have after the service."

It seems to be another case of under-catering, and this time it was the cockpit attempting to deplete the supply, not once, but twice!

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Kbd) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.3.2.858 Mobile Safari/537.35+)

AS does offer the meal selection within a week via its app ^

Tom Douglas does a good job overall.

As for overcatering, I think AS is a bit heavy on it these days as I'm seeing more and more meals available later in the flight.

fly747first

True. I find that AA's Supply Chain department is quite incompetent... they don't take any proactive actions and blame everything on their vendors.

captaink

I'm not sure if BoB catering is high on the priority list for their commodity managers. Other than the overall catering contract management, catering decisions (including quantity/quality of meals) come from Inflight.

That said, I was on an extremely light PDX-DFW flight, seated in row 12 or so, and they ran out of fresh BoB before they got to me. It is certainly annoying to not have the option due to undercatering on longer flights (most of mine are 2-ish hours, and about half are in F).

To make it worse, I was the pax seated a couple rows ahead of me throw away most of a salad when the FAs came by to get trash.

Sant

Does catering load additional BOB on the DFW/PDX-HNL routes?

captaink

They probably should (although DFW-HNL will soon have a LOT more catering loaded), but as far as I know inner US-HNL routes are notoriously undercatered by all airlines.

mrow

Only time I have had proactive FAs offering the complimentary meal/drinks to me as an EXP is on AE either between BTR and DFW or between ORD and YKF which are the two routes I often fly. Never had AA mainline offer it to me, but then I've only flown on AA mainline in Y a handful of occasions in the last few years. Whenever I have asked, the FAs have alway been very accommodating and haven't once asked for my EXP card.