Virgin Australia J Class Meal Loading - Fly Ahead/ Last Minute Booking

[under the radar]

'catering not assured' really just covers all airlines ar**ss ... there is another 'scenario' that can be considered...sometimes pax decline the meal on board for a variety of reasons..(not hungary, working, just eaten, going out for lunch/dinner... etc etc..) so those meals 'allocated' to those pax will become 'available' to 'fly ahead/last minute' pax

 

[straitman]

Catering not assured is common no matter who you fly with, I would imagine catering for non existent passengers would amount to a significant waste over the entire network otherwise.

I agree with markis10 on this.

Why pick on Virgin when this happens across the board. From my experience Qantas is no better in this regard.

 

[bullerdude]

What sucks as a vegetarian is when the non vegetarians pick the vegetarian meal leaving the vege's with nothing :-(
On the J meal issues I have had a mix of experiences.
Changed one flight 12 hrs before and ended up with no meal, on another flight I arrived at the airport early to get on a flight departing in 65 min and there was one....so a bit hit and miss.

JASON

There is a simple solution to half of these problems - allow pre-selection of meal type, if not complete meal, when you book your ticket. This way, you would at the very least get a meat or veg meal as per your choice.
Unfortunately, again virgin is probably being let down by its IT systems meaning they most likely cannot do this at the present time.

In the case of changing flight within T-5 when meals are loaded, I can understand the difficulty of receiving a standard J hot meal as stuff like this has a fair amount of lead time. When you think about it, there are a lot of steps involved in making the food, packing it, and getting it to the aircraft.

However, I think that virgin should have some kind of standard cold J class meal that can be ordered much closer to the departure time. This way Virgin could say to passengers who fly-ahead that whilst a hot J class meals cannot be assured, they will receive a cold J 'fly-ahead' meal.

 

[The Rok]

Reload the pies and put them in the oven as needed. That would sort CNA passengers.

 

[Fruitcake]

Reload the pies and put them in the oven as needed. That would sort CNA passengers.

Cue the "I flew Virgin Australia Business Class and all I got was this lousy LCC attitude meat pie" threads.

 

[VA-MEL]

I have flown ahead for my past four flights in VA -J class and have been told catering not assured. Three of the times i have been lucky enough to have the most amazing meals and only missed out once although the CS was happy to load my tray with items from Y all presented as if it was meant for J. It was also nice to see that i had different meal choices on all flights. btw that Y meat pie is amazing even though it's 10 dollars...