Originally Posted by
nomiiiii
The friend is absolutely correct for an infrequent east-coast traveler who isn't familiar with how Alaska Airlines works.
Not everyone monitors their emails to preorder food, or has the app downloaded to get the notification about it. In this case, they will absolutely be stuck without food on a 5+ hour flight.
Similarly, people might think that Alaska has seat-back tv similar to Delta and not have any media downloaded on their ipads etc. And unless they have tmobile they wouldn't have free wifi either.
Also if coming from the east-coast, the frequencies of Alaska flights are much less, so any irrop situation can easily derail the whole trip by 1-2 days.
Alaska Airlines should definitely offer free wifi and non-preordered food at the very least if they want to be comparable to delta etc (to offer "frills")
Alaska is one of four remaining mainline, legacy, "full service" airlines based in the mainland US, along with AA, UA, and DL. It is of course by far the smallest of the four carriers (and much smaller than Southwest, which started as a low-cost carrier and has a notably different service model, though it in fact has some "frills" that all four of the "full service" carriers have eliminated, like no-fee checked bags), but the narrowbody economy service levels are quite comparable to the other three, all of which have eliminated enormous amounts of service and added a plethora of fees compared to the past. It is no more fair to describe Alaska as no-frills than American, United, or Delta. It is fair to compare the four and argue that others are better at certain things, and to argue that the Delta experience in-flight is the best of the four right now. And certainly RDU is a small outstation 2500 miles from AS's nearest hub, which is not the case for any of the other three.