With respect to all this "premium service never works in the US market" stuff, I just want to point out that one of the key features of CO's turnaround and business model was offering better service than other airlines, including (gasp) meals in Y. And their domestic F (which I experienced a few times) was excellent. Gordon Bethune explained this in detail in his book. I once flew CO in J on a TPAC flight in 1999, and the soft product (food and amenities) far exceeded anything on any US carrier today and came close to today's SQ, NH, and JL.

Also, before Doug Parker degraded AA's product (slashing meals and shrinking MCE), wasn't AA earning higher RASM?

AA was also exiting Chapter 11. Given what Wall Street thinks of AA performing right now, Doug Parker coming back as CEO to replace Robert Isom, who is completely in over his head and I have to wonder does he know what he's doing, would actually be an improvement. Yes, I am serious on that as Parker did reverse cutbacks when he realized they went to far, i.e. he cut meals for like a month on DCA-MIA in favour of Dougie's bag of delights, that got immediate negative feed whereas Isom has no clue on where this airline is going other than America West lite.

Bringing it back to United, the change, which reportedly had some strong dissent at Willis Tower, matched UA to AA/DL on meal window of 900 miles and no exceptions. I would have been certain that routes like LAX-DEN/DEN-ORD, which always had meals served no matter what, would be introduced as exceptions but nope. Race to the bottom for all three.

I had a filet mignon IAH-SNA back in those days, could have been in a fine steakhouse...happier days. Airlines should read Gordon's book too...

I worked for Midwest Express until the end. Yes, people loved the cookies and meals and the seats. But then loved low fares more. Enough people wouldn't even pay an extra $25 for the wide seats given a choice on a flight like MKE-DCA. But, alas, YX could not complete mainly because it didn't know how. Our VP of Customer Service had not flown another airline in nearly 20 years. I remember when the combination of NW and TPG bought the company... supposed to be synergies with NW as a lot of cost savings (then they bought DL and lost interest). One of the first things (which may have actually pre-dated the ownership) was codeshare from LAX/SFO/SEA. I recall one particular meeting where marketing was trying to determine how do we direct connecting passengers over to NW at those transfer points.... their idea was having the flight attendants come through the aisle and hand out glossy brochures with detailed instructions on getting to the NW gates. I laughed as did my boss. We said, you know what Northwest will do, if anything? I had a copy of a WorldTraveler magazine in my office... I went and got it... opened to the airport terminal diagrams... and pointed to LAX where there were gates for a dozen codeshare partners noted with little dots/colors. I said, we will get a mention in this little box. They had no idea, because nobody there had ever worked anywhere else or knew anything outside of the insular company. It was their downfall. They also believed in holding for connecting passengers at MKE no matter what. We used to cheer when we had a 35% on time for the day.

The UA cutting of meals on key routes like ORD-DEN and such is really disappointing. I'm never on that leg unless it's a double-connect, which means I probably didn't have time for food other than a quick loop through a UC. I'd rather have the meal, for what it's worth, on UA than most of what I can get quickly to go in the airport.

Pretty much anyone in business should.

All of our conference rooms in my office have a plush banana, thanks to Gordon's book.

it dovetails with the social media driven expectation that if you aren�t a CEO by 25 you are a failure.

news flash. The years of experience in business and handling customers can�t be learned on Google.

If the airlines pitched food altogether and used those resources to get there on time, I would not miss it one iota. I�m a crappy cook and yet can make a better meal than any airline in 15 minutes, but I can�t get myself from EWR to SFO in 5 hours no matter how hard I pedal

I have to strongly agree with the comment upthread that VX was the modern example of "a carrier with a domestic F service that was a cut above". It didn't work at a financial level, and honestly when flying VX I constantly wondered how much extra I was paying for that 55" pitch which, while nice, was kind of overkill.

If I were running an airline though, I think there is ample room to try to differentiate with an extra $5-10 or so per seat-flight to improve catering. These cuts, like the Snacking discussed in this thread, just seem so remarkably short-sighted because the cost savings are immediate and any reputational impact will take years to accumulate.

I miss Midwest Express.

Same with me and ORD-DEN. It's usually a double-hop with 40 minute connections so there's NO time to get food at the airport and my ALB-ORD flight will usually leave at 5:50 a.m. or so which means nothing is open at the airport (well unless you wanna stand in line at Starbucks for 30 minutes). So the meal was a nice plus when I'd be traveling 7 hours and up for 12 without any food.

remember when ALB had CLEAR and Commutair? Man you could get anywhere from that airport, and a $20 a day next to gate parking slot �

Looks like UA is at it again. Sorry if this has already been posted, but with the major W24/25 update last night it looks like all coast to coast red-eyes have changed from Dinner to Snack. I checked SFO-BOS and SFO-EWR and early as well as late red-eyes got dinner removed.
checked 10/27 and a few dates around that

I'll try to find out.

I'm not following, what is the change? These flights already showed Snack but so far serve normal dinner anyway.

no, they have shown �dinner� for a couple of years. This is clearly a change.

I have not seen it show "dinner" on the description in the last few years. For example,

receipt
"snack"
🤷‍♀️

I really wish they would bring back meals in First on ORD-DEN, DEN-IAH, and DEN-LAX (and/or all Southern California).