BA’s former “Elizabethan Service’
 

I remember travelling as a child with my parents; in FC, on a BA 747 LHR to HKG (Kai Tak). This route had the ‘Elizabethan Service’. This included signature meals (like 16th century lemon sillibub, stuffed pheasant, violet cakes..etc ), all luggage tags had ‘Elizabethan’ emblazoned on them. I really enjoyed it and it seemed that everybody else around me, also enjoyed this ‘historical’ difference. But I wonder why BA stopped doing these commemorative specials?

The man who is Cruzifying BA says that "cost reduction is in our dna"

The Golden Age of air travel, I am so sad to have missed that!

Some amarcord pictures here of proper premium service, particularly love the complimentary cigarettes: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/a...-40-years.html

PS Before the thought-polizei opens fire on me, no I am not a Daily Mail reader, I found the article via Google.

I think that's a very lovely memory of an era - perhaps even in private aviation - we'll never see again. I've learnt something as well - I wasn't remotely aware this even happened, so thank you.

The reality now really has much less to do with cost than logistics.

Catering operations are not run by the airlines, they're subcontracted to large companies such as Gate Gourmet who cook massive numbers on a industrialised scale - it's their core competency.

If you asked them to make a one-off meal for a single route, the likelihood is they wouldn't be able to do it even if they wanted to, at least within the accepted commercial confines the whole world lives under, and it's unlikely any airline would split off a tiny part of its catering contract. The company awarded it would have to be so small and agile/flexible to cope with the variety needed that it simply wouldn't ever be able to justify the number of hoops it would have to jump through to operate airside.

Yes virtually every airline is able to get catering at outstations to which they only have a single daily flight, often with their own cutlery and branding and meal choice

"6.6-inch bed"! BA cost-cutting goes back further than we thought

Yes, but still only with an established catering company at that airport which has airside clearance and quite possibly as part of a global agreement. Gate Gourmet, for example, can be found on every continent.

I'm slightly entering the field of conjecture, but I'd think the meals offered on those single flights are still at most a variant of something the caterer offers as standard. When was the last time you saw the sort of cuisine the OP describes on an aircraft?

BA also return caters on an awful lot of routes as well, so I think the general point about the practical difficulties still holds.

Reminds me of Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris when everyone thinks that the Golden Age was a few generations before theirs! As it happens, I'd personally prioritise a safe flight (your "golden age" had way, way, more accidents!) and a flat bed (as opposed to the armchairs you would have had then even in F) over a distant replica of a 16th century menu.

Without hazarding a guess as to your age(!), was the introduction of this 'Elizabethan Service' in 1977, perchance, coinciding with the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II?

I suspect that this has more to do with the demands of customers than whether it is feasible.

The Golden Age of travel is now about a non-stop flight half-way (or more) around the world in a fully-enclosed lie-flat bed. While people do want good food and drink, it's not the greatest determinant.

Put another way, if BA offered an Elizabethan class within F, how much more would you pay for it than for standard F? I suspect that the demand would be fairly low.

Yes and no, I agree an Elizabethan service these days would be a bad idea and demand would be low, but more because tastes have changed and most F passengers these days don't want to eat mock-Tudor style food than because F passengers aren't willing to pay for high quality dining. BA's F food is already dated enough to me without taking it back another 400 years!

What exactly is the differentiating factor between F and J for the passengers willing to pay for it when they both have flat bed seats if it's not the soft product? The fact that BA F catering isn't that different to J is part of the reason why BA isn't able to charge any material premium for F over J a lot of the time in my opinion, in contrast to many other airlines.

That may be why F is not long for this world. Perhaps the ME3 can sustain it, but it is harder and harder to differentiate the F & J product for the core business customer once everyone gets a lie flat private seat with decent food.

We live in a world where more and more CEO's and other senior business people are conscious of an appearance of excess.