For this winter holiday I had choosen New Zealand. I’ve been here before, but that was in wintertime, so I decided to try a summer trip too. The route is the same as last time, a 32 hour trip on Finnair and Catahay Pacific via Helsinki and Hong Kong.
For the Finnair part of the trip, I decided to try the pre-order meal service, called ”Meals designed for you”. The ads for this service promises a grand meal, but I was already told by fellow frequent traveller not to expect anything. ”Unedible” was the most common comment for this meal service…
It didn’t start very well, as the web site for ordering meals didn’t even work. I called the service center and they too failed to make a pre-order for me. They had to send the problem down the lines, with a promise to mail me when the issue had been resolved. But no mail arrived, so when I boarded the plane I wasn’t even hoping to get my reindeer sirloin in any shape or form. There was also a late change of planes (to the really old and tarnished A340 OH-LQF) wich also set my hopes way down. That meant that my preferred seat 1A was changed to 6D (and the really annoying fact that back C-cabin was designated to carry lucky economy class passengers, getting much better seats than they were paying for).
Row 6 is the last row in business class, so I was the last one to get served. Surprisingly, my reindeer sirloin was there. It was not very well presented, but at least it was more than just edible. It was no gourmet meal, but it was OK. Business cabin was serviced by just 2 crew this flight, probably because they diverted crew to economy. But it was not good enough, service was slow.
The cathay pacific CX107 was also somewhat of a disappointment this time. Cathay is always good, but this flight was not anything to write home about. No special greating by the service manager, and no extra service. This flight seemed to be full, so work load on the crew might have affected service levels. Not good enough, though.
So after a few days relaxing in Auckland, I am off to Australia, and on my first time on a Air New Zealand flight. Will this also turn out to be disappointing? Well, as I am about to board, the final decision has not yet been made, but the trials so far just to get checked in and lounge access, isn’t helping getting the grades up.
