gemac

You are never guaranteed a special meal. You may get it, maybe not. If you really have to have special food, take charge of your own life and bring the food you need on board with you. If the "special meal" is really just a preference, then it is OK to rely on someone else to get it to you.

rabble

The way AA handles special meals is a mess. Sometimes it's bad enough that i swear i'm going to switch airlines.

First off your meal request is tied to your PNR, not your AA number. So if things change like you split a PNR or do just about any change of flights, you lose your request. If that happens within 24 hours of the flight, there's no way to get it back. Even when i do the jumping through hoops to request the special meal, sometimes it gets lost anyway.

There's no special meals for domestic first or business. The best you can do is follow FEBO and hope there's an option. For international flights, if your SWU clears late, then the special meal is probably waiting for you in economy. What they do is just arrange your main course on the business class plate. Same rice, garbanzo beans, and boiled veggies as always. If your SWU clears early, more than 24 hours before the flight, then they'll have lost your meal order all together. So you've got to call back when it clears and asks or it again.

Perhaps it's just some crazy diabolical plan to get people to paid biz seats instead of upgrades. Perhaps with a paid biz/first seat, the special meal system works.

My big question is this. Why the hell can't they track my meal requests all the time? They know if i want a window seat or isle. They know my passport number and can send me a text message with the gate for my connecting flight when i land. People's dietary needs don't change often. I'm not going to be vegan today, then kosher tomorrow, then bland (yeah that's an option) the next day, before returning to wanting the normal meat options. They don't even let you select special meals from the online booking.

QueenOfCoach

I agree 100%. It's really hit-and-miss.

If you have a serious medical, religious or ethical reason for special food, then bring it along with you. Do not rely on the airline to provide it. There's too much that can go wrong (equipment change, etc).

irrawaddy

They do offer special meals on domestic transcontinental flights (JFK-LAX, e.g.), but VGML is pathetic.

Pueo1

Specifically special meals are only offered on domestic trasncon nonstop flights ... my GF and I have had the gluten-free meals (breakfast and dinner) on the SFO-JFK flight and it was pretty good, actually.

sdsearch

Actually, you can be vegetarian (dairy ok) yesterday, vegan today, bland the next day, no-this the day after, and low-that the day after that, because they're all the same meal. Some years ago, for cost-cutting reasons, instead of designing lots of different special meals, AA figured out how to make one meal serve most special meal purposes (by including only what was acceptable for every one of those meals).

The kosher meal is separate, and perhaps there's one other, but most of the other special meals have been consolidated. (That's why, for example, on the vegeterian dairy-ok special meal they always give margarine, not butter, and only fruit, not yogurt or cereal with milk, for breakfast.)

Sam The Man

^You're absolutely correct.You have to re-order your special meal once your upgrade clears.It does carry over sometimes without calling it in but I suspect that's only because somebody working the reservation for re-ticketing is actually pro-actively re-entering the request.The notation in the PNR for the request remains in the system somewhere in the history so a good agent will notice and resubmit the request but definitely don't count on it as more often then not you will stay hungry!

It's true there is no way to re-enter a special meal request in to the reservation within 24 hours of the departure time but I've had the EXP desk offer to call the appropriate department at the departure airport to orally request the meal when it was just a little past the 24h deadline.

At a couple of hours before the 24H deadline If you believe you have a good chance of clearing the upgrade based on availability in the cabin and your original UPG request time it also doesn't hurt to call the EXP desk and have them submit a request to Revenue Management to clear the upgrade so you can get your meal.

It's also about time AA should let you submit special meal requests on-line instead of having to call it in every time.Even better, allow you to save it in your AA profile.

aviationp

Are special meals available on MCO-LAX flight? It is scheduled for over 5 hours, so I guess it is transcontinental, but not sure if its premium enough to warrant a special meal

sukn

Nope. However, if you route thru MIA, it would be possible.

abitlost

Recalling a past thread about lack of GF meals on AA flights to La Paz or something like that, I checked the list of cities in South America that have special meal service to make sure MVD was still included. Here's the list, and it doesn't include any cities in Ecuador.

In all classes to or from Belo Horizonte, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador or Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile or Montevideo, Uruguay.

CMK10

Hey thanks for answering my question. Sadly, it's a year too late to help him out with any information but it's good to know.

fairplayforswitzerland

This thread is recent enough to bump, I guess.

I've recently taken up vegetarianism and am curious about the ubiquity of the delicious cheese ravioli on transatlantic flights in J. Is it on all, or some? Will I get stuck with some salad with any probability?

norf9

Flying to LHR , I don't think I've seen the ravioli that much but the Uno cheese pizza seems to be fairly consistent.

Science Goy

Scanning the last few dozen posts of this thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...solidated.html

it looks like ravioli is NOT always offered; however, there typically seems to be some kind of veggie pasta on transatlantic lunch/dinner flights, whether ravioli, tortellini, lasagna, or girasole.

Mark_T

The ravioli is a main meal choice, but the pizza is the pre-landing 'snack' on day-time flights so they are not really alternatives.

Also I'm not entirely sure that the pizza can even be considered edible, although I did note last month that it had changed from the Uno offering to something different but I still gave it a miss.