intuition

Indeed it is. It is the exact same main meal, but they added a starter and cheese and removed the dessert. Utterly pathetic.

heatsink

"Grilled sander Grenobloise and potato pure flavored with cod, garlic and thyme."

What I ate was "Beef stew with dark beer sauce, mashed potatoes and onion, red cabbage"

I neglected to mention we were still served ice cream after the meal, so there was in fact dessert. Sorry about that.

wkndtraveler

Thanks for the information. But certainly that isn't mashed potatoes. Seems AY ran out of potatoes this time and ordered some Spätzle from LSG Sky Chefs instead. And is this, for real, supposed to be the meal that a top chef has designed?

ffay005

The MIA-HEL BusnessLight experience did not differ much from HEL-MIA and was, cateringwise, far better than the horror pics that we’ve seen posted from HKT and SGN return flights.

Check-in/Bag drop was fast and efficient. There’s one dedicated J/Prio desk. There is no priority line at Concourse F security at MIA and the relatively busy security line took 25 minutes.

The only lounge at Concourse F is Club America. Many people hate it but I find it quite all right. They have a J side and an F side and as AY J pax, you get to use the F side. I don’t know whether the J side is any different. Cold sandwiches, cookies, some apples and drinks including alcohol are on offer. For the GT lovers here, they serve Bombay Sapphire. Self-service bar so no need to pay $1 for a complimentary beverage. The lounge was not too busy.

In true AY style, boarding started about 15 min before ETD and was completed about 10 min after ETD. J and all status pax were called first.

Catering was subpar, which should come as no surprise. Nuts, small salad ( feta salad on the menu, but instead of feta, there were three small pieces of dry chicken on the side of the minuscule salad), two main course options, two pralines, cheese, and Häagen Dazs vanilla ice cream.

The main course options were salmon teriyaki and veal medallions. They ran out of salmon by row 4, so for rows 5–7 there was no choice (the plane had a 7-row-J config). I had preordered the veal, which tasted okay. On the MIA-HEL route, you can preorder one of the two options that are on the menu so if any one of you wants the salmon, the preorder seems the way to go.

I had hoped for Finnish butter to go with the Finn-crisps, but they didn’t have any left from the HEL-MIA flight.

The utensils were even further reduced: one fork, one knife and that’s it. I got a separate spoon with the ice cream, though.

One thing that I paid attention to was that the water they served was Coca Cola Company’s Aquarius Purified Water, probably one the cheapest brand available and not even spring water. That’s a disgrace. The 1/2 litre bottles were Zephyr Hills, the most generic brand in Florida but at least it is spring water.

The menu is only for MIA-HEL, so my guess was right. HAV and POP have separate menus on the inbounds, based on what the outstation catering can serve, even if MIA/HAV/POP share the outbound menu.

Btw, does HKT/KBV/SGN share the outbound menu from HEL, as well?

They did not run out of champagne, but instead were happy to serve it during and after dinner (many children in J, maybe that’s why it didn’t run out).

No breakfast order cards. Everyone was served a breakfast tray about 90 min before landing. Warm omelet, croissants, American yoghurt, sliced fresh fruit. I found the breakfast to be okay.

AY is turning this to a year-round route and changing the schedule to coincide with the Asian wave, thus creating very good connections to/from Europe as well as Asia. I hope they will, at the same time, upgrade this route to full-service J. If not, they will give a terrible and partially wrongful image of their J product to a whole lot of European, American and Asian bisnetic [sic] pax choosing to fly AY.

heatsink

SGN-HEL

*** Boarding ***

Somewhat off topic for this thread, but boarding was not handled well (again).

They waited until everyone had crowded around the desks to announce that Group 1 will board first, and even then they only meekly walked around with signs. It took people forever to realize what was going on.

To their credit, they actually enforced the groups for once, but it was still pretty difficult for me to get through the crowd. I didn't even initially realize that I should try, because at first I thought they were just letting everyone through yet again.

I think I've said this before, but if they'd just start assigning separate lines per boarding group things would probably go very smoothly. The fact that people don't know where to wait is like 99% of the problem. If you're in group 2, you're forced to try to guess where group 1 ends or alternatively board dead last. People don't want to be rude.

And to top it all off, there were no signs for business or economy despite two doors being in use, so pretty much half of the economy passengers took a wrong turn and boarded through the business class cabin.


*** Service ***

• Nuts served with the first drink order again.
• The crew seemed to be too busy at certain times, as two drink orders were either forgotten or deferred until a cart passed through. (I don't know which)
• There was no menu available. Either catering had forgotten to load it or they've recalled it. It might be the latter, because on HEL-SGN the card erroneously said "A350 signature menu", which was rather amusing given the quality of the food.
• For the first meal, I chose beef. It was again sub par for business, but still fairly tasty taking into account that it's basically an Aurinkomatkat flight.
• The second meal seems to be the same as what wkndtraveler got, but on this flight it wasn't chewy and dry. It was ok. The fruit was delicious.
• The ice cream had apparently been taken out of the freezer early in order to soften it up a little, but the timing was off and it had become a bit too soft - and I was in the front cabin. I would prefer if they'd just serve it straight from the freezer. If someone wants it soft, they can wait. The reverse is not possible.
• The crew was friendly and happily brought me several cheese sandwiches that I kept requesting.

teme

I flew Phuket-Helsinki yesterday and with very low expectations the flight turned out be be a rather pleasant experience even with the reduced business class service.

Short summary:

- Escorted fast track service at old and overcrowed Phuket airport worked well.
- Lounge - blaah.
- Full flight in both classes.
- Good crew and service in business class.
- Drinks and nuts before meal service.
- Main meal all right, although as mentioned all served at once, and only 2 options for main course and only ice-cream and chocolates for the dessert.
- Drinks plentiful, no shortage of champagne.
- Several rounds of snacks and sandwiches between the main meal services.
- Second meal very simple and nothing to write home about.

All in all, knowing about reduced service beforehand, okay flight, but obviously on a 11 hour day time flight you could do a more elaborate meal service. And, in my opinion, still false advertising when sold as business class. The crew was the best part of this flight.

WilcoRoger

HEL - ICN

While not a "Business Light" destination in itself during the 3 hrs I was awake (3 hrs for meal service!) quite often the IFE looked like this, so this department was really quite "light"

Now some people surely appreciate the knowledge, that the IFE runs on a 14 years old modified RedHat Linux, but those poor souls that actually tried to watch something must have had a bad day.

PS - it was booting reaaaal slow and during that time you couldn't even switch of the overhead light...

tsastor

Perhaps it was not a boot sequence but another Finnair teaser about Finnish exports, this time showcasing Linux, the brainchild of Linus Torvalds?

intuition

ROTFL! ^^

Kirtap

Some reflections from my recent HEL-MIA (C) flight. I keep it short because my observations are very much in line with what has already been reported. Overall, crew was excellent and the flight was quite enjoyable. Full flight, food ok but we did run out of Champagne (and white wine). There was a negotiation that I witnessed at one point (quite early in the flight) whether to open another bottle or save for the return flight. I am starting to wonder if they have less Champagne (drinks) onboard to begin with on these leisure type flights or if it is just a coincidence? This has NEVER happened to me before on any AY flight with about 15 years of experience of AY C. maybe I have just been lucky.
I guess the main thing that I just cannot get around is why they call this service “leisure type flight” (lomanoloinen). A fellow passenger asked for an espresso coffee just to be told that “we don’t have the coffee machine because it is a leisure type flight”. Do people only drink coffee when they work? Please, AY! At least change the misleading name of the service and market with transparency so that people know what they are buying.

wkndtraveler

Unbeliavable and totally unacceptable! This has happened to me three times already within a year but always on return flights. Now champagne starts to run out already on outbound flights.

A purser on my latest no-more-champagne-in-J-flight from SGN to HEL told me AY doesn't stock champagne on these leisure type flights (how stupid name is that ) as much as on flights to Japan for example because AY expect people who are on holiday doesn't drink champagne that much.

Lucky you.

I've made a reclamation each time this has happened and received twice 10 000 Finnair Plus points as compensation. Once I was given a 600€ voucher but that time I complained about the whole business light product since it wasn't advertised properly and thus I didn't get what I thought I was paying for when I purchased my ticket.

I've even been in contact with the head of AY catering services but it sadly seems AY is more willing to pay compensation to those (few?) pax who complains than improve their services.

I really don't get the logic behind this. Don't they have those coffee machines installed, or do they remove them when the plane flies to these "leisure type" destinations?

On SGN-HEL flight, I witnessed a conversation between the purser and one customer who suggested crew to open those champagnes that are for sale. The purser declined and brought prosecco from Y class.

Aviating

I do not think it is uncommon that they run out of Champagne on these flights.

Happened as well when I flew a year ago HEL-MIA.

Ed Size

Running out of drinks happens pretty frequently on all airlines in all classes. I would say on one out of five flights I do there always something run out by the end of the day.

On my last AY flight they run out of lemon and out of ice - so we had warm G&T at the end.

wkndtraveler

I understand that sometimes something runs out and stock can't be endless but if champagne – or any other drink – runs out one hour after take off, something has went wrong. Or then someone's drinking habits has been unexpected.

tsastor