Originally Posted by
DLASflyer
This would make sense given my 63 segments since March 1 and 0 hot meals. There seem to be only a handful of stations catering actual F meals.
Delta (and American/United) are having all kinds of issues with consistent catering. All of the caterers did a lot of cutting expecting COVID to last a lot longer than it did and it is taking a long time for them to hire and expand to cover everything.
I think I saw somewhere that American is going to bring some aspects of catering back in-house in their hubs to do all the issues they are having. Like a lot of other things, this is an industry wide issue that no one has a solution too.
Originally Posted by
LikeaGVI
Thanks for the update as I thought I'd read somewhere that hot meals were coming back to routes over 900 miles during meal hours. Last week we flew JFK-STT at 8:30am which is almost 4-hours and would have very much appreciated a hot breakfast. This route is well over 900-miles. Is JFK an airport that doesn't have its s*** together?
With all the D1 flights out of JFK I would suspect there's no excuse why they couldn't cater actual meals vs those pathetic boxes. The only box option they had was a cranberry bread with a couple blueberries and a single strawberry and some sort of whipped cream. More like a breakfast appetizer than a full breakfast.
I don't think a single station for a single US carrier has its stuff together if we are being honest but as said, they general rule seems to be that if they can't do proper catering on the out AND back, then no one is getting it.
I know some Fters wont like this, and I am not standing up for the airlines per say, but they are all having a hell of a hard time with staffing. Either they point blank can't get people to work or they are getting new people to work but that area saw A LOT of brain drain at the start of COVID. Just a non catering example, reservations has been a total .... show for a few years now. Delta literally has open positions at every reservation center they have (and I think open work from home spots as well).
But not only do they need bodies, even the people they are bringing in don't know all the little tips and tricks like someone who has been working their for 15-20 years, much less the people who worked there 30+ years that all retired. Frankly the staffing issues thanks to COVID (and some of it due to airlines still thinking they way they thought in bankruptcy) will be felt for a LONG time.