No Special meals in Shorthaul CE from LCY?
 

Hi all

I flew LCY-GLA in CE last night, and was told there was no Veggie Meal booked for me (despite it being on my profile and never having had a problem on this route before). I was offered some additional bread instead. Fine it's annoying but not the end of the world.

I called up BAEC today as my return is tomorrow and I wanted to make sure it was picked up. I was told it's not and never has been possible to book SPML for domestic and short haul flights from LCY, even in CE. It's a franchise and so they can't cater for special meals.

Is this right?! I have a couple of flights from LCY-GLA in CE coming up (super easy and cheap way of getting 80TP a time!) but ideally would like some food on board as I've paid for it. I have flown GLA-LCY recently and there was a SPML onboard for me (and I told BAEC this, to which she was fairly incredulous) so I know it's possible!

It's certainly something that isn't working very well. When CE Domestic was introduced, the usual form on MMB was greyed out for selecting the Special Meals by flight, however those who had it on their profile often got/get the Special Meal. The exception being JER, which despite being a shortest of the lot, had no problem on either BA.com or operationally. Breakfast time isn't usually a problem, since there are 2, potentially 3 options and one of them will be vegetarian. For the rest of the day, unfortunately if you have a restricted diet then I wouldn't assume that CE domestic is going to provide catering. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't. The key issue is whoever is doing the sorting in LCY - all meals are loaded there - whether they spot the relevant flag and load accordingly.

The duck and chicken salad meals both have vegetarian side dishes.

Thanks cws, this is the first time it hasn't worked for me - and the chicken salad that I was given last night definitely didn't have a vegetarian side dish, it came only with bread and dessert.

This really doesn't make sense to me, as you would think that BA would sort out its CF operations - this seems pretty basic to me really. So there's nothing I can do to request it, other than ensure it's on my profile (which it is)?

I had the same problem last week. (LCY-EDI) I couldn't order a special meal online and even with VLML in my profile there was nothing loaded for me.

The crew offered 3,000 Avios by way of apology and said they would write an e-mail to catering about it since it was happening a lot.