Cost saving or service improvement?


Tags

I will let you guys be the judge for this one. Japan Airlines has recently changed its drink service on international flights but I am not sure if this is a cost saving measure or a service improvement based on customer feedbacks.

Some of you probably haven't heard of this page on JAL website before. Every month JAL will post an update/improvement on its service on its website based on customer feedback.

The "improvement" for October is to combine drink service with the main meal service on JAL international flights. This is to give passengers more time to enjoy the flight, whether they want to watch the inflight movies, take a nap or let the workaholics finish up their work (one time the elite sitting next to me was typing up his trip report on his flight back to Japan from LAX.)

If I understand this correctly, this means they won't first hand out rice crackers and drinks before the main meal service in economy. I actually noticed this back in July on my HKG-NRT, HKG-KIX, and HND-HKG flights (but not NRT-HKG). On those flights they just completely bypassed the rice crackers and handed out the meal right after the plan reaches cruising altitude. But you can still get the rice crackers if you ask the cabin attendant and they will be happy to give you some. This practice definitely will save JAL the rice cracker cost and the cost of extra round of drink service before main meal.

But according to JAL this is implemented according to customer feedbacks and is their October improvement...I will see if this is indeed what I think it is on my coming flights.

CONVERSATION

2 Comments:

  1. I just flew back to LAX from NRT 2 weeks ago and they also bypassed the rice crackers. However, they did handed out rice crackers on my LAX-NRT but not on NRT-HKG flight back in July.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks like I was lucky to have rice crackers on my NRT-HKG on July 3 :) If they are really to combine the drink service with main meal, they should just hand out the rice crackers with the meal. But of course that would mean it costs more :P

    ReplyDelete