American Airlines Is Trying Harder In Coach—Better Snacks, Confused Passengers, And An Awkward New Service

American Airlines started refreshing coach snacks on Thursday. There’s no more stale generic pretzels they tried to make interesting by putting airport codes of their hubs on them. American Airlines now hands out name brand snacks instead! AA’s pretzel bags showcase their different hubs. This isn’t all, there are others for the missing hubs. byu/YHDiamond inamericanairlines They announced that what would start rolling out October 1 was: Morning flights: Biscoff cookies and Goldfish. Later flights: Goldfish, Tate’s Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies and Peterson’s savory and sweet snack mix. On my flight on Friday the afternoon choice was Goldfish, snack mix, and Biscoff (rather than chocolate chip cookies). And I actually wonder whether a choice of three items necessitates making an announcement. Too much choice genuinely confused people, and slowed down service and everyone did a double take and pondered the bounty of their options. (I’m being serious.) Customers freeze. They don’t understand the snack, haven’t considered choices. So each row takes about twice as long to serve, which keeps everyone else waiting. The person in my exit row at the window asked for the (old, stale generic) pretzels. It took a bit to register that wasn’t even one of the choices. He took the snack mix. The woman in the center seat took a Biscoff. I took the goldfish American Airlines isn’t just trying harder with the product, they’re asking flight attendants to offer an elevated service although I’m not quite sure that this first iteration works. It is literally impossible to “place napkin” “place beverage accompaniment” “place beverage” on a window seat customer’s tray from the aisle. Flight attendants have to hand the item, how do you reach over the aisle and middle seat passengers to place the item? ‘Placing’ may be nicer in a restaurant, or if the other seats were empty, but the configuration of the cabin makes that not work. I don’t think an online flight attendant training with instructions on how to do a new service quite gets at what American needs here. They need to hear from leadership how this connects to the goals of the airline, how they’re part of a fight with Delta and United and that their service is the difference-maker, and how this will translate into greater profit sharing (and also back it up with smaller, concrete regular incentives for hitting service metrics). Topics on this page