Originally Posted by mpkz

It would be very silly to revamp the business model based on a temporary suspension of travel.

My guesses on the rationale for changes in J:
1) Connecting passengers from Asia rate the experience based on the longest flight and the lounge, not on whether the short haul meal was fish or something else. Really, the impression (and hence price sensitivity) is 90% determined by the longer segment and the airport experience - the shorter segment can only damage the impression if it is done really badly, but I don't think this is bad enough to do it, not even close..
2) Contrary to what you might believe from reading FT, there are virtually no paying leisure flyers in C on HEL O&D routes. Ice hockey players, (former) Nokia executives, Supercell founders, I've sat in the back on flights with all of them, it's just not a very Finnish thing to do to pay a premium for a warm meal. So therefore this market (which IS quality conscious) does not need to be catered to.
3) Intra-Europe business travel, the market that WAS being catered to before, will be hit hard by COVID & the long-term shift to online. Therefore if you can cut costs on kitchens (though I don't know how big of a cost center this ever was), maybe it makes sense to do so. Though I am not sure how sensitive this segment is to food on board.

The Y changes are the ones that shock me a bit more because they seem short-sighted and actually something that may have been in reaction to the pandemic. Maybe market research already showed that Finns ALREADY think of AY as a budget carrier, but charging for coffee sounds like the kind of move that will anger O&D flyers and push them towards other airlines. For instance, I am not sure whether Finns perceive KL as being significantly different from AY right now, but after this change and a bit of flying, they surely will, and might be less price sensitive when they see a KL flight. And KL and LH can offer pretty significant competition on almost any O&D route outside of the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Once again, I think connecting passengers will care more about the long flight, but not getting a coffee or tea on the 2.5 hour connection to Paris may turn some off as well (but I think the hit to O&D passengers will be bigger).

I get that every euro per passenger that Finnair extracts is a huge difference to their bottom line but if it comes at the cost of making O&D pax much more price sensitive, it may well hurt them in the long run. Maybe they thought with Norwegian gone, they have no direct competition on most routes? Still seems a bit short-sighted given that LH and KL can offer really short connections to a wider range of cities.