silverbird007 said:
At least management is listening to and responding to our customers complaints as well as watching the competition. That's what they are paid to do.
AMEN! I want to split a hair with the OP on his thread title. The
cheapening of the meals--lower quality, less attention to detail--has been going on for some time. The
reduction in the offering of tray service meals from 2+ hour flights to 2 hours 45+ minutes is the recent mistake that seems to be the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. (An interesting anomaly...in several cases i've noticed that though we are serving less frequent tray meals, the quality of the entrees and salads on the meals we do serve has improved somewhat overall. And, God knows, the snack basket is a HUGE improvement over our "gourmet snack"--says so right on the package--that was in reality, 90-95% low quality pretzels with
an almond,
a rice cake piece, and
a poppy seed stick thrown in for contrast.
)
I fly #1 most of the time, and for the past couple of years I've been on a tear writing up the catering on almost every flight. Not just the meals themselves--though having catering papers say that you have 10 chicken entrees and you take the foil off of them right before serving and discover that you have 10 meals of mystery meat that sorta kinda looks like beef is a problem--but also, broken glasses in the inserts when there is no piece of glass in the insert or in the cart which means they put it in the insert already broken. Or, one insert of ice for a 3 hour flight. Or, 8 full-size bottles of wine taking up space in a double-catered turn flight where both legs have breakfast snack baskets!
Another thing a "world-class" airline does not do is present a breakfast snack basket to frequent flyers that contains bananas greener than some of the limes we are receiving in the drink garnish cups. I remove them from the basket, then present the basket. Before landing I go out with the green bananas on a tray and ask if anyone wants a banana that will be ready to eat in a few days. The passengers seem to enjoy the joke, and some of them will actually take one of the green bananas. The other side of the coin is the catering that can not be corrected with a joke--the bananas that are BLACK they are so overripe or bruised. I take those in to Operations to share with Flight Service management.
And now, kudos to our world-class frequent flyers...if my experience is the norm then they are not taking the service/food reductions out on the flight attendants. They seem to know that this is not our doing and that the company doesn't seem to listen to the employees who spend the most time with their customers. All I can do is check frequently and make sure their drinks are full and the trash (particularly from the snack basket items) is removed from their immediate area. That and keep on writing up the sloppy catering.
You know, it's not like we are new to this airline business thing. We should be able to do this in our sleep, or certainly without a lot of forethought. But, the same catering mistakes keep happening over and over again. I've made the observation (when asked) to more than one Flight Service manager...catering (particularly at DFW) keeps doing a sloppy job and using substandard product
because they know there are no consequences. AA keeps right on paying the bills whether the catering is correct or not.
