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I have booked a BA holiday to Tenerife. So it’s a 4.5 hour flight from Heathrow. So I saw the pre order food option and thought 4.5 hours pre ordering some food sounds like a good idea.
Basically the only offering is a few sandwiches or a scone, apart from nibbles like crisps! They do not even have a single gluten free offering.
This is all the more surprising having earlier in the week been looking at pre order choices on offer from Iberia to Madrid. They have a wide range of hot meals you can pre book.
Now I can understand boarding hot food in the hope it sells might be something you don’t want to do, but selling it in advance? Come on BA get your act together.
The selection on easyJet looks considerably more expansive. I don’t know why the BA selection is so limited?
Both EJ and FR do a decent range of hot and cold sandwiches and snacks. The £2 chocolate bar is a rip off though!
Club World is dire too. Serving frozen food or burnt Food on filthy aircraft.
Luckily salads and sandwiches do just fine out of a fridge for a few hours, in fact most are better at room temperature and the terminal has a number of options including Leon, Pret, Jones the grocer etc
Club World is dire too. Serving frozen food or burnt Food on filthy aircraft.
You were lucky to catch them on a good day.
Club World is dire too. Serving frozen food or burnt Food on filthy aircraft.
You were lucky to catch them on a good day.
That is overly harsh.
All business class products can have off days; even ‘world best’ Q-Suite gets its fair share of nasty reviews. I concede BA is more likely to have a rum day, but I wager 80-90% of the time it’s a good product. Even in the old seats.
I target 95% for satisfaction in my business so I think 80-90% is not good enough, but most punters will have a nice time regardless. Sometimes stuff goes wrong. Sometimes a customer just wants to kick off.
Disclaimer: I got fed up and sold my IAG stock.
I have to say that most short haul operators for holiday destinations from the UK are poor for gluten free. Last time I checked Ryanair do nothing, Easyjet do almost nothing and it’s been invariably sold out by the time they get to me, and Jet2 are solid with a pre-order chicken meal or breakfast meal. However the Jet2 offering has not changed for years.
Thomas Cook used to be very good, but alas are no more.
The best is BA club, with a gluten free meal chosen in advance. For a flight 4+ hours the food plus extra space really swing it for me.
Those saying about the various options in an airport would seem to not have a food allergy/intolerance. The options tend to be very limited, often zero, for gluten free and no doubt other allergies.
@Cranzie. On a recent SH flight my first offering was frozen…..solid and the replacement had burnt veg. Was offered 5k avios which I rejected and subsequently got 20k avios . Would rather not have gone hungry!
Ryanair does a gluten free lasagne, however as it’s also vegan it is bound to be an abomination.
I’m fortunate not to have any allergies, but if I did have I think I’d just bring my own food as who actually knows what they’re serving, either in the terminal or on board?!
*I have no issue with real vegan food, just the UPF nightmares like vegan “cheese”!
Bringing your own food is the way to go. However it’s not always easy to buy products abroad for the return trip. Taking a number of protein bars from the UK for the return flight has worked in the past. Not interesting, but they’re filling and take up little storage space.
Club World is dire too. Serving frozen food or burnt Food on filthy aircraft.
You were lucky to catch them on a good day.
That is overly harsh.
All business class products can have off days; even ‘world best’ Q-Suite gets its fair share of nasty reviews. I concede BA is more likely to have a rum day, but I wager 80-90% of the time it’s a good product. Even in the old seats.
I target 95% for satisfaction in my business so I think 80-90% is not good enough, but most punters will have a nice time regardless. Sometimes stuff goes wrong. Sometimes a customer just wants to kick off.
Disclaimer: I got fed up and sold my IAG stock.
From our experience, it’s not really harsh. The original comment was about the dirty aircraft and food and I responded with my experience of both over our last six BA CW flights. I didn’t comment about the seat or the service or compare BA to any other airline.
On every occasion the seat, surrounding area and table were filthy and the seat had food and large volumes of detritus clearly from multiple previous flights – truly gross. They don’t open the seats to clean them. My wife will now bring wipes but should not have to do that, but if you live in a clean house, keep your car interior clean etc. it’s intolerable.
In respect of the food, the issue I have is defective food prep, I’m not talking any issue of taste or personal opinion. I have experienced what @Cranzle describes and more. Food such as salad once frozen so dead on arrival, and the strange quinoa type salad with the top frozen solid. Vegetables burnt (not charred) such that they are only recognisable by a vague shape and the menu description. Chicken so overcooked that its composition has changed. Potatoes almost raw. Pasta totally uncooked and on one occasion frozen. Cream sauces split so that the texture has gone from creamy to grainy. Ice cream that has thawed and been refrozen so presenting a health risk and having an unpleasant texture. These are all fundamental defects by the producer and I’m certain not limited my wife’s and my food as can be ascertained from onboard complaints and apologetic cabin crew acknowledging the issues, not for the first time. BA should simply reject these meals but there is clearly no QC; I wish they adopted your firm’s 95% satisfaction rate. These matters have not gone unreported, but nothing changes. NFI.
On a more subjective note, the long haul Club menus are poorly planned and they are realistically undeliverable. The concepts and visual aspects are just wrong and unappealing. The first courses are probably the best element, cheese ex London is OK to decent by airline standards, but on the returns is atrocious. Puddings are dreadfully unsophisticated for business class or any foreigner. The wine quality is unacceptably low for business class. The great mystery for me remains how Club Europe food concepts, presentation and execution are so infinitely superior.
The service on BA long haul is extraordinarily variable, but however good the crew are, on the late departures to South Africa and South America they are incapable of even getting a drink out over 90 minutes into the flight. The Iberia SAm midnight departures manage to serve drinks and (a far superior) dinner in a highly efficient manner and their crew are just of a different calibre. BA suffers from the largest Club cabins in the industry but with a correspondingly low ratio of cabin crew and loos to passengers.
So @masaccio from my personal experience my comment was indeed harsh, but I believe fair.
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