Originally Posted by
ma930407
Just my personal observations:
(1) Meal quality is certainly declining - meals from the USA are known to be bad but now it's even worse, especially the cold "Lox & Bagel" for the second meal for a 14 hour flight (I was shocked!!!); there are also very limited snack options between meals; no hot towers on most flights for economy (has anyone else also observed this?)
(2) For economy, JAL crews used to do regular drink runs in between meals during long haul flights - this no longer exists.
(3) Sky Wider is as usual great - however, the seats are very hard and start to shown a lot of wear and tear
(4) Delay is becoming more usual than before
(5) Crew service has become inconsistent - funny enough, I've found service of overseas crews of JAL (especially those from Hong Kong, Bangkok and Taipei) to be consistently better than the Japanese crews; I've met a super impolite Japanese economy class supervisor on my NRT-MEL flight in April this year that ruined the entire experience (this is the first time I saw a very lazy JAL cabin attendant (and a supervisor) who bowed towards the back of the passengers, did not check overhead compartment, only knew how to order other crews to work for her and was super annoyed when passengers ask for more drinks)
(6) JAL is still better than others in terms of overall experience I would say but the gap is narrowing (and potentially not worth the price difference).
More or less exact same feedbacks. I would add:
(7) I took approximately one domestic flight a week in 2023 and had to deal with much more delays than before. Most cases are "Due to late arrival of the aircraft". No doubt they try to fill their planes schedules like a cheap LCC.
(8) Sky Oasis is more like a sky desert recently. You can certainly ask the CA for something but the whole point of paying JAL premium pricing is those kind of services. The drink cut before the first meal on Y long-haul is just too hard not to notice as a plain cost cut.
(9) Domestic new booking rules since April 2023 making most bookings refund much more expensive from 55 days prior to departure versus just a few days until then
(10) No more blankets in Y and J on domestic flights (they may even put it as a perks for the F class at this stage...)
(11) My recent discovery fresh from yesterday: the new "oshibori" dispenser in JAL lounge with a skinny oshibori getting out without any cover into a tray where everyone put their hands. Those SGDs rules have such a great success when it comes to cut costs.
(12) The revamped website that keeps being saturated with many bugs (so is the app in terms of bugs)
(13) And let's just acknowledge that COVID and war in Ukraine can't justify that just long-haul flight went from 150,000 JPY in economy to 300,000 JPY (and with the degraded services) while departures out of Japan are at much more reasonable rate
Once a JALmaniac, I am progressively switching my bookings to the competition whenever I have the opportunity