Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
I have an honest question: why does it matter to whether one gets Champagne 15-20 minutes earlier or later? It’s not that passengers spend hours on board without liquids. Typically they have spent time in a lounge before (where certainly there is some Champagne), and as soon as doors are closed the corks are popped as well. We are really talking about that small window between leaving the lounge and the aircraft doors closing. Does that really matter?
Firstly, as observed above, it's often either PDB or nothing until cruising altitude. Once the doors close, the crew are busy getting ready for pushback.
Also, no discussion about the LP experience is ever going to concern necessity in an objective sense. I could go without champagne for 20 minutes, for two hours, or even the whole flight - I'm still going to get to the destination. However, I don't think "
we'll let the passengers go without their champagne after boarding because we want to save a few dollars per bottle" is quite the marketing angle AF have in mind for a product they charge absolutely top of the market for, when
even BA find ways to serve it on the ground in the US.