on 19 March 2010
Like many airlines, Air Canada is transitioning to cashless cabins, but unlike the vast majority of carriers, Air Canada gives consumers the option of prepaying for meals online.
In fact, Air Canada has offered consumers the option of prepaying for a meal voucher online since 2008, and its call center agents have been offering meal vouchers as part of a la carte flight options for the past year.
Canada’s dominant network carrier believes it is the only airline in North America to offer an online pre-payment option for meals.
Passengers can purchase Onboard Cafe, at a 20% discount, up to an hour before their scheduled flight as long as they haven’t already checked in.
Once the meal is purchased online, a voucher code appears on travelers’ boarding passes.
Internationally, AirAsia also gives travelers the option of prepurchasing meals online for 20% off.
AirAsia, incidentally, also offers travelers Live Chat from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
Starting May 1, Air Canada — with the exception of its contracted airline-partner Jazz — will feature credit-card-only cabins, and Onboard Cafe will be available on most flights within Canada, on Canada-U.S. flights, and on trips to sun destinations.
Air Canada has used credit-card readers on all flights where Onboard Cafe was an option since July 2008, and for the May 1 launch of cashless cabins, the airline is doubling the number of handheld credit-card readers available to crews.
The availability of the online meal-prepay option for Air Canada flights punctuates the way in which many airlines are offering ancillary services on their websites — and these services are unavailable to travel agents in global distribution system channels.
Air Canada was an early mover in implementing fare families — including Tango, Tango Plus, Latitude, Executive Class Lowest and Executive Class Executive fares — and it continues to be a leader with features like its online meal-prepayment option.
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Based on recent experience, I believe you are using a very loose interpretation of the term “meals”… Conventionally, that would imply food and logically, some form of nutrition.
When an airline can only identify a meal only by referring to its general zoological class (skipping the species, genus or family) there are some issues…
Idea for Tnooz investigative report: Looking for nutritional value in airline food. You could offer a big reward if any Tnooz nodes could find some and produce an authenticated sample…
Robert: Well, the other question is: Does the food being served today differ from airline food of, say, two or three years ago?
My critical food reviews normally appear in big glossy magazines. Well, not really, but it sounded good.
Im guessing when people are willing to pay for the actual cost of flying the airlines will serve real food Robert. As long as the airlines are forced to behave like walmart and cut each others throat so the bottom rung doesnt have to take a grayhound then be prepared for crap service,crap food, crap planes, and maybe even crap pilots.
The last thing people should be complaining about with these historic low fares is the food.
See pilots on foodstamps on youtube.
or flying for cheap on PBS
Way to go Jack, I’m glad there are some people out there who understand that pretty much every airline out there is losing money on actual passenger transportation. The only place where they can make money is in the points program, maintenance facilities, or international investments. Having divested each, Air Canada likely will not survive the next decade. Airlines might be selling plastic wafers aptly named “crackers” and god-only-knows-what packaged as “meat” for meals; but there’s more money to be made doing that than fitting 200 people in a metal tube and blasting them around for insanely low prices compared to the actual cost. Just for comparison, a big jet like the Boeing 777 will burn more gas taxiing from the gate to the runway than your car would driving around the entire planet, and we aren’t even airborne yet. Suddenly that $800 ticket seems like a bargain.