How did they allow this to happen? It means they didn't load enough sets of breakfast? That sounds really bad.

Thi thread seems devoid of any fact at all.
Did the incident(s) every actually happen ?
I find it very unlikely that the airline "ran out of breakfast" without everyone being offered the meal
Ran out of choice is of course always possible.

In my case, I faced this situation at least twice and as mentioned instead of the hot breakfast, I got a mini pizza from C, which btw, was not a satisfactory replacement. I also explained the circumstances of how it happened.
Suggesting that a poster that has been participating in this forum for 10 years is lying will not make flyertalk a better forum. We are here to report occurrences and experiences on the airlines we love or need to fly, and hopefully if a CX lurker is present, they will take note.

Old China, your comment is devoid of any fact. It is just a repetition of your unchanging position that neither Cathay nor Swire can do any wrong. One might have thought that you would be come more cautious after seeing the number of flights Cathay has and is having to cancel due to shortage of suitably qualified pilots after all the posts you have made insisting that they have sufficient.

TY I tend to ignore your personalised and repetitive anti Cathay rhetoric for what is.
However as you seeming have read my posts on the subject you should have noticed that I have mentioned that the airline is tight for pilots -seeming too tight to withstand this winter flu epidemic.
Until just prior to Christmas the airline was able to fully run its published schedule i..e. sufficient pilots - those pilots have not evaperated they are as per the airlines statement 'sick' and the airline as has been freely admitted does not yet have enough cover.
Not a good situation but cancelling 6 flight pairs out of around 130 daily is hardly catastrophic or unusual - BA routinely cancels over 3% of its daily flights and it is considered normal and rarely mentioned .

Flying back end (usually) I've certainly noticed a real slide in the CX offering, as compared to my last CX flight pre-Covid. Last month I had a pretty uncomfortable flight DXB-HKG. No drinks service other than with the meal. Breakfast was a cruddy, flavourless chicken sandwich. Left me to mull on the impact of reduced cabin space also. And other flights over the last year-and-a-bit were at best uninspired.

Yet CX still charging a significant premium. And filling seats due to limited schedules to/from HKG (especially on CX but quite a few carriers yet to return). Hence the profitability from high load factors - bolstered of course by freebie tickets from government crowding out / increasing prices for those of us whose travel is dictated by work requirements.

It used to be easy to justify paying a premium for CX. Schedules & reliability for those paying for my work-related flights; quality for me (e.g. when I'm not getting reimbursed). And of course FFP benefits. It became much harder to justify the CX fare premium last year, especially with reduced schedules (e.g. HKG <=> Middle East down to a daily HKG-DXB & vv).

For first time in 13 years as of this month, I'm back down to Green. Only the third time since 2000 IIRC. Annoyingly I had a 4-sector long-haul trip which would have been in PEY or J which was repeatedly deferred, which left me short.

No with basically no benefits whatsoever now for Green, I'm now reconsidering who to align with going forwards. But yes, based in HK, it may well end up being a grudging continuation with CX. But can't help feeling it's time I explored other options.

Why would you make a comparison with BA? CX purports to offer a superior service? Their networks are quite different too. There is a real, undeniable drop in service in many areas from CX (while charging higher prices) and no amount of spin glosses over that fact

oh and let the bashing commence, at the expense of one hearsay. Interpretations upon interpretations.

To run out of choice is possible. To run out of food, never. Crew will do their level best to assemble a meal.

Peace out

Planes are frequently in the air for not a lot more than 6 hours on the route even they're blocked for 7.
That's a pretty short mid-haul. OK, longer than India but certainly shorter than Australia.

Roughly similar to a TATL eastbound. I'll use that as comparison (albeit, expecting CX to do better than the likes of BA/AA).

Em, par for the course, given just more than 6 hours flight time.

Compared to...? Haven't CX flown A330s on the route pre-Covid too? Or are you comparing to EK

Yes, schedule is the premium you're paying for.

Any options for you? Serious question - feels like we're a bunch of South Vietnamese after "liberation" looking for the best smuggler boat out.

This is just another thread based on unsubstantiated, second hand information by how it reads…. As others have said, run out of choice - maybe. Of food - hardly. And as OP said themselves, they do not know which one it is, or whether it was a request for a second breakfast declined…. Nothing to see here…

Read a CX flight attendant FB post two months back. She mention that CX will usually cater 95% of the meals.

for example , long haul flight usually have 3 option
rice
noodle/potato
vegetarian noodle/rice.
usually they will prepare in 40/40/15% basis as some will order special meals.

But the issue is that they won�t know how many paxes will want to eat rice or noodle on that flight.

so for full flight, some paxes are only left with vegetarian.

so usually it is run out of choices. Not run out of meal.

Is it normal for airlines to cater only 95% of the meals? If that's the case, it's definitely possible that they run out of meals. It's quite an unacceptable situation if that happens.

It's normal especially if it's a red eye flight for example that they know from historical data a % of pax will choose not to eat.

But just like overbooking, in the 95% of time that they are right, no one would notice since it won't cause any impact. However in the 5% of the time that it doesn't turn out as they predicted, this kind of issues happen and usually it's passengers taking the consequences.

Re: seating comparison, whilst post-Covid I've been doing DXB quite a bit, pre-Covid it had been quite a few years. But can compare to India pre-Covid (DEL, BOM and MAA), which varied a bit. I think the issue is that CX claim 18" rather than 17.5" seats, but the armrests are so narrow everyone's elbows inevitably encroach on everyone else's space.

(Aside: I'm not comparing vs EK as they're an airline which has long annoyed me - claiming to be "THE award winning airline" which infers no other airline is award winning (especially when considering the significance of using "the" in Arabic). And I fear CX are going this way, in terms of claiming premium service (and charging premium prices) whilst standards actually slip considerably. I guess that at least EK often don't charge premium fares in Y)

The schedule is a fraction of what it was HKG-Middle East. From 2x daily HKG-DXB and up to daily HKG-BAH, now once daily HKG-DXB. (Excepting recent cancellations!) And the flight time of the once daily service isn't that great - I always used to grab the overnight HKG-DXB flight to connect onwards in daytime and then fly back on the midnight/post-midnight flight from DXB, enabling easier sleep. Now it's arrive late evening, so either spend a night in DXB or rock-up wherever in the small hours of the morning, having missed a night's sleep and hence not being rested to start work; and then coming home, departing DXB a few hours before being sleepy, so resulting in at most a couple of hours' sleep.

Given that this is to fly onwards to RUH, seems QR will be who I fly with next. Twice daily connections HKG-DOH-RUH and theoretically two, though in practical terms one convenient connection daily on homeward leg. As I've now (as of last week) lost Silver, I don't get any discernible benefits on CX any more anyway. No priority or semi-priority check-in or boarding, etc.

But yes, the problem is whilst QR might suit for the Middle East and offers an alternative to LHR for West Africa, it doesn't really help once I start travelling again within E/SE/S Asia...

FWIW, RUH is a priority on the list of flight restorations for Cathay. When it's going to happen though given the current situation...