Originally Posted by hsmythe
Carfield:
Regarding your comment following:
I guess this quote from alaskaair.com no longer applies:
"Passengers seated in our main cabin on flights which are not transcontinental, but with durations longer than 3 hours, are offered a hot sandwich during mealtimes. First Class service on these flights includes a hot entrée meal service."
In all fairness, the pastrami sandwich on my flight last Sunday was served hot and I found it quite tasty. The new F dinner would have made a nice F lunch service on a 2 hour Alaska flight, just not quite fitting for a 4.5 hr dinner flight.
(On the other hand, I think the salad option was served cold
- folks seemed to go for this as their first choice, as the final 2/3 of the cabin ended up with the sandwich).
The breakfast service on the SEA-ORD AM flight (egg custard slice with fruit garnish, was however truly skimpy and disappointing - even the addition of a muffin would have helped ... how much more could that cost ?
PS, I did eat dinner
before boarding that 6:00 pm ORD-SEA flight.
One muffin added to the breakfast doesn't sound like much but do you remember that old story about American Airlines removing one olive from each salad and saving some unbelievable sum of money? It wouldn't be just one muffin but one per F seat on each flight that offers this service. Adding one 25 cent muffin to approximately 50 flights per day (a rough and very conservative estimate, the number is likely higher), based on 12 seats per airplane, amounts to just over $50,000 per year. Keep in mind that some planes have 16 seats in F and 50 flights is a very conservative estimate - it's most likely just over 60 flights per day. That's also a conervative estimate for a muffin. 25 cents is probably a reasonable wholesale price for a decent pastry of some sort but we are being charged by the caterers and they add money to the price for meal assembly and delivery. My point is that it seems like it wouldn't add much to the bottom line but we are dealing with large numbers that add up through the year.
Some might say that $50,000 isn't much to add to increase customer satisfaction but the reality of it is this: It's highly unlikely that people will book away from us because we don't serve a muffin with breakfast. If we do add the muffin, and it does cost us in the ballpark of $50K (again - a VERY conservative estimate), where will we recoup that? It's not likely that we'll find people booking towards Alaska because we added a muffin. The competition we need to be concerned with isn't serving a lot more in comparable markets. United does but United has been in bankruptcy for three years running. They are getting ready, once again, to announce their latest plan to come out of bankruptcy. We'll see what happens (it's too bad there isn't a three strike law where this is concerned) but United isn't dealing with the financial realities that every other solvent airline is. On the west coast we compete with Southwest, United and (to a much lesser degree) Delta and Air Canada. On the ORD/DFW/DEN runs we compete with one or more of the following: United, Southwest, American and Frontier. The only carrier that serves anything more is, again, United and Air Canada.
I'm not saying that these changes are great but this is the reality of this industry these days in the United States. Some airlines are only now beginning to show improvement to their bottom line, after making the cuts that bring us to where we are now. I don't think that things are going to get better unless we see a huge upswing in the economy and the fiscal state of the airlines. Then, maybe there will be some positive catering changes....