I'm not a seasoned traveler but I never depended on an airline meal.. yuck!
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The death of the airline meal - MSN Money
Deregulation and the Internet have made flying so competitive that rubbery chicken and limp veggies no longer make sense. Plus: What frequent fliers eat these days.
By Karen Aho
Time to stop complaining and accept it: It's gone.
The free in-flight meal, an ingrained part of flying since crewmen handed out chicken-salad sandwiches on 1930s passenger-mail planes, is firmly, unequivocally, dead. Industry watchers don't expect a resurrection.
But that's not a bad thing. If you understand why the economy-class meal is gone (on domestic flights) and know how to navigate today's options, you might be better off, financially and gastronomically.
In fact, it's a wonder the little meal in coach hung on as long as it did. Here's what happened:
A symbol of luxury
In the beginning, the airplane was hardly a good place for a meal. Cabins weren't pressurized, restricting pilots to low altitudes with heavy turbulence. Nor were airplanes soundproof. The rides were bumpy, cold and loud.
Commercial flight was novel and expensive. To help evoke a sense of luxury, airlines displayed images of diners eating off fine china high in the sky.
"Air travel was known for catering to the rich and famous, and that meant red-carpet treatment at every turn," said Joe Schwieterman, a transportation expert at DePaul University in Chicago. "Railroads competed on the basis of food, too, so airlines had to outdo the railroads.
"I suspect that it would be considered impolite for one person to eat while the other person economized. That may have been part of the reason airlines never charged for the meal."
A way to compete
Air travel grew after World War II, but federal regulation set the fares by route. Unable to compete on price, carriers built their reputations through service. After adjusting for inflation, a flight in the 1970s cost twice as much as today, but it could come with a champagne breakfast.
"Food was part of the overall experience, and it stayed, and it lingered," said Dean Headley, a marketing professor at Wichita State University in Kansas. "Up until maybe the early '90s, food was very much ingrained as an expectation," even on short flights. "It took 40 or 50 years to undo itself."
In 1978, Congress deregulated the airline industry, freeing carriers to price at will. Southwest Airlines, pioneering a low-cost, no-frills, peanuts-only airline, expanded beyond Texas and by the 1990s was filling cross-country flights, proving that customers preferred price over food.
"Southwest's success made meals more extravagant than practical to many travelers," Schwieterman said. "It opened a whole new frontier of long-haul travel without meals."
An unaffordable perk
The turn of the 21st century brought the final blows: transparent pricing via powerful Web search programs and an industry financial crisis made worse by 9/11. Between 2001 and 2005, the U.S. airline industry lost $35 billion.
In essence, the system has been a victim of its own success, said Andrew Thomas, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Akron in Ohio.
"We squeezed inefficiencies out, including amenities, and as a result those savings have been passed along to the end user," he said. But a gap in expectations remains: "A lot of people think flying is a Nordstrom experience when in fact it's become Wal-Mart," Thomas said.
How it happens, what you can do to help prevent it and why you may be tempted to give up your seat on your own.
The experts don't foresee the meal cart rolling back.
"No, I think the market has spoken," Thomas said. "What people want from the airline industry is they want choice and they want cheap."
Every $3.50 counts
The airlines are precise but quiet about their financials. But here are a few food facts released in recent years:
The average meal cost the large airlines an average of about $3.50 per passenger last year and $6 per passenger in the early 1990s, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. It adds up. In October 2007 alone, nearly 64.5 million passengers boarded domestic flights.
American Airlines said in 2005 that it would save $30 million a year by eliminating the remaining free food in coach.
Southwest, of peanuts-only fame, still spent $17.1 million on food and drinks in 2002.
In 2005, US Airways said cutting pretzel packets would save the airline $1 million annually. Northwest Airlines announced it would do the same and save $2 million. United Airlines cut pretzel mixes from short flights for $650,000 in savings.
"The catering truck that delivers the meal, that's probably 100 bucks every time it touches the airplane," said Michael Boyd, an aviation analyst and the president of the Boyd Group, an industry consulting company. "The costs are obscenely expensive." To provide meals, airlines have paid for longer turnaround times at gates, extra weight, galley ovens -- even special coffee makers at $10,000 apiece.
The Death of the Airline Meal..
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