East Coast Kahuna

Cutting corners on airline costs

A disadvantage to living on the East Coast is the extended travel demands, both in distance and time. In the recent past, maybe going back around 7 years, they always fed you two full meals on extended flights. Then about five years ago, it became one small meal and a large snack. The trend has continued, so that over the past year or so, airlines are not including meals with their flights in the coach cabin. You do get beverage service, with a tiny back of snack pretzels included - anything beyond that you have to purchase, or bring on board yourself.

I feel sorry for the catering companies who used to provide meals for the airlines - many workers in this area have probably been laid off. The snack vendors in the airport areas probably have increased their business- at their inflated prices. The other alternative is to eat the limited selection on the plane at a moderate price. These meals are all cold and borderline in acceptability. Since they aren't all used, I'm sure they are also older on the average when compared to the catered hot food.

Now they don't bother collecting for headphones with the in-flight movies and TV shows, but there sure are a lot of commercials. Now you can use your own headphones. The headphones that are left behind are questionable in cleanliness now. Remember the old days when they used to put a fresh cover on the headrest on every flight. Or when the blankets and pillow cases were all clean and rewrapped. Not anymore.

I just hope that we won't start hearing about epidemics based on airplane flights. You aren't on long enough, unlike the cruise ships which have had problems. And now that they aren't serving meals, there's less chance of giving everyone food poisoning.

posted by tjh14850 @ 4:27 AM