No need for blueberries, I'm on the champagne... Probably no special breakfast.

CHML - Champagne meal. Optimized to fit the dietary requirement of FT'ers

Those who are serious about this lifestyle choice restricts the diet to Champagne, but many allow themselves numerous side sallads aswell as distilled champagne.

I´ve now tried to pre order meals for HEL-BKK Feb 18 + return for two weeks.
 

But I just come to a page claiming that they are changing their menu, and will come back with the new menu one week before the change.
Anyone else having the same problem?

Seems to be another problem as my flight is now one week and 21 hours away.
That means that even in the very unlikely event that they are changing menu exactly the same day as my flight , they now only have a few hours left to meet their deadline to publish new menu one week before the change...

About your question re the upgraded pax, I´d say they´ll have no inferior treatment.
Plats should be offered to choose food first. Sometimes that works, sometimes not.
But after that they just take the orders from the front to the back without any considerations if passengers are op-uped, voucher/point upgraded or fully paying.

Its Better to eat well before the flight and forget those airline meals.

Burger King take away for our Long Island DO flight?

JFK is operated w/ A330, so no increadible air quality to begind with :D

Fast food, popcorn and instant noodles smells are almost irresistible for me. and i reckon they smell better than it tastes. :)
Whenever im in Y, if someone is eating the instant noodles, i just couldn't control myself to get one as well.

They've loaded the menus now. Was able to choose meals up to early May.

However, for SGN-HEL, they show what the options are but they don't appear in the drop-down menu, so no preorder from SGN :(

LAX missing, no food offered on those flights?
So obviously they have loaded only existing routes but one could easily assume LAX=SFO? Yes, the filename also says so.

Are meals always served all on one tray (appetizer/cheese/main??)
Are breakfasts always sweet option plus cold salmon option? I wonder what AVML breakfast option is...prefer something hot and filling.
Also odd that there is never a regular veg option for those that don't know to special order. A cold salad with optional meat on SOME flights is not enough in my opinion.

Depends on the route, most meals on daytime flights are served with separate courses while the contrary on night flights. On AY5 (HEL-JFK) which is a daytime flight the meal service is extremely lazy with everything dumped at you at once.

Wow, how disappointing. For a flight that leaves JFK at 545pm, people expect to not be rushed into a meal if they don't want to be. Im doing JFK-HEL-BKK-HEL-JFK and it sounds like every flight will be a rushed, one-tray service like economy. Dessert separate though, of course.

I was so impressed by the HEL-NRT meal service that I probably set my expectations too high for today's AY74, NRT-HEL. While the salmon appetizer was good, the beef main course was small and bland. FA agreed to serve me salmon soup after the main course as they had extras, though he made it clear it was an exception. Dessert was the usual Häagen Dazs and petit fours, not out of this world but quite okay.

Midflight, they proactively offered fresh fruit salads and cling film wrapped small sandwiches. The usual Pirkka crisps and Fazer candy were available in the galley.

However, the second meal service was a joke, and a really bad one at that. They promised club sandwiches, but for 40-42 J pax, only 8 had been loaded. So as Gold, I got an Alepa style chicken Cesar roll, or to be precise, half a roll since they had cut it in two halves, one of which was on my plate together with some Pirkka crisps. After I told the FA what an unimpressive second meal it was, he apologetically suggested he could bring the other half... In the end, I opted for the warm noodles, which were okay and a light year from the “Western option”.

The FA was clearly embarrassed, too, and said that they were usually better-catered.

(A third option was a salad but something had gone wrong with that, too. I didn’t listen to the explanation because it would not have been my choice anyway, but clearly NRT catering was having a bad day. Hopefully those don’t come often..)

Moreover, even though the menu says second meal will be served “at any time after the first service”, I was diligently informed (about four hours before landing) that the second meal service starts 2 hours before arrival.

Wow. This speaks volumes! Where there any Japanese/Asian options to choose from though?

Yes, there was a choice of Japanese or Western appetizer, and of the main courses, I guess the salmon soup was the only Western/Finnish one. Chef's special was a Japanese chicken dish, the fish option was Japanese and I suppose my beef was Japanese, too, although it was very nondescript.

For the second meal service, only the noodles were Asian, but I'm not really sure if they could be considered Japanese. Thin, seasoned noodles, felt very pan-Asian to me.

Ouch, sounds bad.
But if the "Club" was anything like the last time I had one (long time ago) you didn't really miss anything. Very little filling and dry bread.

It's surprising and sad to read about a bad day of NRT catering. I was on AY74 recently and the meals were great. The Japanese appetiser in a really nice Finnair-branded wooden box was perfect, followed by the meal of their Japanese signature chef - again, very good, even though, it was something special taste-wise.
The Chef's Special meal seems to be made out of chicken all the time. Not much to be desired, let alone the misleading name, somewhat signalling it's related to the destination signature chef.
Just petit fours couldn't compete to the HEL-loaded chocolate-raspberry cake.

It would be interesting to see if AY has anything to tell about it if you send them a note.

I was thinking about this, but I don't really know. It would sort of be begging for extra points, which I don't want to do. The FA did what he could under the circumstances and sort of saved the situation (which, of course, wasn't his fault in the first place, save for the unwillingness to serve the 2nd meal at leisure).

AY7 HEL-MIA on 23 Feb, completely full flight, actual flight time 10h 45mins. On boarding was greeted at a seat in the mini-cabin by a Fazer chocolate wrapping on the floor. PDBs served promptly, so promptly that I had my bags all over the place and had not yet seated. On time departure.

In the air the first beverage and amouse bouche was served around 50 mins into the flight, so not too bad. Refill of drinks not proactively offered but was granted on request. My food choice was salmon starter and the arctic char main. Both were tasty, but here is the biggest let down: one tray service concept. It is beoynd me why they keep doing this on a 11 hours day flight. In practice, this means that the main course is luke warm if one wants to eat the starter first. Otherwise tasty and quality dish gets wasted. On the plus side they now had a proper dessert in addition to Jymy ice cream and the strawberry cheesecake was good.

Champagne ran out at around 5 hours into the flight. Obviously I arouse this with the one tray service issue with the purser and our FA (an older lady). The purser was very understanding and patiently listened to my rant and promised to file a report. We also discussed how AY really should try a bit harder, especially as service is where they could partly make up for a fact that A330 J seats are really not factory fresh anymore. Also, as AY is part of TATL JV and there is also other competition on TATL, they should pay more attention to service.

OTOH, I do not really agree the explanation I got from our FA:
1) HEL-MIA has been considered as lomanoloinen, so thus one tray service, as otherwise customers wonder where their food is if they are served only the starter first. (Or something like that, as I really did not understand as it all sounded so weird.)
2) According to HEL-MIA is one of the heaviest and most tiring flights for the cabin crew as "viinaa menee niin paljon" and so the service must be one tray. Okay, so that is an excuse for lackluster soft product? I really hope that she and her colleagues will live and be able to lick their wounds for two days by their Miami pool. (Sunny and 30 C forecast for today.)

She also did not see how it would be possible to revert to a "normal" three course service on this route, not to mention that customers could choose how they want to dine. Also, the one tray service was not particulary fast as the service was completed at around 3 hrs into the flight.

To summarize, food continues to be of decent quality ex-HEL but there remains a clear underestimation of a customer and thus the product delivery is lackluster. Of course the crew told me to write a feedback to AY but I am not sure if they are bothered as they have been turning more and more routes into this one tray mess (e.g. HEL-HAV and HEL-JFK were "normal" service in Feb/Mar 2018).

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...bed862782b.jpg

Now hiding into a cave before I will be beheaded by all of the AY fanboys here. :p

I don't think anyone will want to behead you for demanding a coherent, consistent longhaul J product. That's what we all wish for. This "lomanoloinen" stuff has been going on for ages. The first post in this topic has the situation covered some years ago: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/finn...nesslight.html

There seems to be some improvements, as there now is a real appetizer (though only the size of Euro J and not longhaul J). On the other hand, prices are regular J prices nowadays, too. Only checked MIA, but I didn't find anything ex-HEL below €2000, as used to be the case.

I believe AY is shooting themselves in the foot with this one. I might partially understand the reasoning behind "okay, NRT/PVG people are important, let's make good J service, but MIA/HKT people are Finnish and Russian holidaymakers, let's save some pennies", but this leads to inconsistency and unnecessary badwill. If they need a low-cost J cabin for those cheap AM upgraders, then assign the minicabin to them and save pennies there, but if you're selling +€3000 tickets and reduce catering, that's a big no-no.

I doubt yoy'll be beheaded for this. Fans of 1-tray is scarce and most people here flying premium xabin actually thinks service should be premium,
And if not, then nake room in your cave for ne too! ;)

One does wonder why they keep on adding more and more of these "leisure" routes when they think so little of the passengers that chose to fly on AY on these routes.

One would like AY management to make up their mind. Are they running a scheduled airline service or a holiday charter bus operations?

Not adding. GOI just axed for next winter.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy with both-and instead of either-or, but it needs to be clearly marketed.

Make a clear division between regular longhaul flights and "leisure longhaul". Price LLH differently and market it differently. €1500 return. "On our leisure longhaul routes, we offer a highly comfortable Premium Economy cabin, where you enjoy the comforts of a lie-flat seat and tasty meals, bla bla."

DXB is a good example: the J meal service is nothing fancy, but still good and way better than Y. Copy that concept for LLH flights and it will be just fine, as long as you don't call it Business Class.

And PUJ "new" destination.

And PVR axed. :D

2–1 for OH-LGG :D

Hasn't the number of routes with 1-tray service increased, or am I misled in that notion?
(ie not just talking new leisure dest but "normal" routes started skimping)