Chicken Schnitzel Delivery to Your Airline Seat in an Hour
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APEX Insight: The uptake for pre-order in-flight meals is low – less than five percent of passengers per year decide what they’ll eat prior to boarding. But, during his talk, Nikos Loukas, founder of Inflight Feed, explained there’s a whole world of pre-ordering that the majority of us are missing out on.
“You can have the best technology … you can have the best training in people … but I’m a big believer in food,” says Nikos Loukas, an airline food critic and founder of the blog Inflight Feed. “I think it is a form of in-flight entertainment that … cures the boredom a little bit.”
Loukas has eaten his way around the world, flying at 35,000 feet while slicing into a piece of hot fried pork in business class on Singapore Airlines or sinking his spoon into a bowl of Asiana Airlines’ warm Korean rice porridge – but his presentation at the Passenger Experience Conference (PEC) in Hamburg focused on the trends of pre-order meals on low-cost carriers (LCCs).
In a nod to the gathering of the passenger experience industry in Germany for PEC, Loukas teased attendees appetites by talking about how to pre-order chicken schnitzel on Austrian Airlines. “One hour before your flight, you can just walk up,” Loukas said. He was referring to the LCC’s Last Minute Express counter at Vienna Airport, where passengers can order the German specialty an hour before their flight. “I think that’s pretty amazing considering most airlines require at least 24 hours.”
Next, Swedish carrier Kullaflyg defied stereotypes of airline food as unhealthy by bringing organic meals sourced from local suppliers on board – 35,000 feet from the farm-to-table trends taking up on the ground at environmentally-conscious restaurants. The airline saw 70 percent of passengers make an in-flight purchase, Loukas said, “Because they knew the quality was there.”
AirBaltic came up with a feast-for-the-eyes approach with a pre-order concept on their website. It presented passengers with an image of an empty meal tray, which they could fill à la carte, by dragging and dropping different items onto their tray. At the time, it was only a concept the airline was exploring, but Loukas had antecedently published a post about the pre-order method and it was picked up by The New York Times and The Economist.
On the bright side, the publicity showed potential interest from consumers and catapulted the concept to a real catering option for the airline. “They make three times more out of a pre-order meal tray like this as they do on their buy-on-board program,” Loukas said.
And when it comes to red meat, Loukas bets on Pegasus, the Turkish low-cost carrier, for its ability to deliver a meal that actually matches the picture. “It’s perfectly arranged. The way that it looks here on screen is the way that you receive it in flight. And I believe that they have one of the best steaks you’ll ever get in flight.”
Very few passengers actually take airlines up on their offer of pre-ordering meals. Air Berlin sells about 180,000 pre-order units a year. “It’s still anywhere in between about one and four percent of total passengers carried each year that will actually order the meal. So it’s very low numbers still.”
Asked why passengers are slow to take up pre-ordering? Loukas said, “My firm belief? … I don’t believe passengers know about it. I’ve been on so many flights where I might have a really nice pre-ordered meal in front of me and a passenger’s like, ‘How did you get that?'”