Originally Posted by
sluggoaafa
The biggest issues are/could be
1) what city are we in. Some cities have policies in affect that we can't serve any alcohol on the ground:
Cities where alcohol cannot be served on the ground: CLE, CMH, DAY, MDT, BDL, JAC, EWR, PHL, PIT, ICT, all TEXAS locations prior to noon on Sundays. On Hawaii flights, open liquor carts after takeoff and seal them prior to landing.
2) Catering is late
3) hard to serve while boarding. starts a bad customer experience when someone is swimming upstream
4) Since IFS service only serves pre-departure Water/OJ/Champagne, why should AFS serve something different?
5) Inconsistancy in boarding doors for 757. Some stations (SAN, EWR), they board at 2L, where many other stations board at 1L DFW, ORD, JFK, LGA, MIA. It's so much easier to do pre-departures when you are not swimming up stream dodging bags, being thrown into a pax lap because someone knocked you down.
6) What you consume on the ground, you will not have in the air. You drink all the Bailey's on the ground...there is no Bailey's in the air. Best to save the drinks for inflight.
7) lazy FAs
1. As far as I can tell, only impacts Sunday mornings (when many of us would not be flying anyway); I have had pre-flight service on DL in some of those locations on other days.
2. Exactly how often is catering late? If this is so common, AA oughta improve ground operations so it becomes less common!
3. If GAs would wait a couple minutes between boarding F and boarding Y, this would not be an issue.
4. BOTH ifs and afs oughta have industry-standard pre-flight C / J /F drink service. There is no requirement that AA put itself at a competitive disadvantage to other carriers w/r/t premium service!
5. Boarding doors are inconsistent. So what? Resolving #3 should resolve this.
6. There is a finite amount of alcohol aboard any flight; I have NEVER been on a DL / CO / FL / etc flight which ran out of alcohol in the air due to that which was served on the ground.
7. Again, no argument here.
Seriously, I am not trying to bash AA here so much as make a suggestion for a significant improvement of AA's domestic F service. As demonstrated, other airlines do this, and IME it does not have any significant impact on ops. Hence many of the anti-ground-drinks arguments can be refuted by referencing experiences on other carriers. CO even manages to do ground service on most
delayed flights!