Hello,

My wife and I traveled on US Airways Flight 672 from Philadelphia to Seattle on July 2 of this year. We were traveling First Class. Some twenty minutes before the first boarding call, it was announced that there would be no food available for purchase on the flight and that customers should purchase their meals in the airport. I assumed that this applied to Coach Class only, but went to the counter to confirm it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that First Class passengers would not, in fact, be fed on the flight either. We would, like everyone else, need to avail ourselves of the anemic variety of overpriced insta-food being sold in the airport.

This was a very egalitarian gesture on US Airways’ part, but seemingly out of keeping with the hundreds of additional dollars we spent on our tickets compared to Coach Class passengers.

The flight attendants on board seemed aware of this inequity, and attempted to make up for it with stellar service; kudos to them. However, this is simply not sufficient recompense for your oversight. The opportunity to get completely smashed on unlimited free booze—an opportunity I graciously declined—doth neither a proper meal nor a proper First Class air travel experience make.

My parents, who took a United flight out of Philadelphia at roughly the same time, were fed in First Class on both legs of their journey, and fed quite well, from the sound of it. So you apparently do not have the excuse, for instance, that travel-ready food was simply nowhere to be found in the Philadelphia airport. If there existed some other, possibly equally relevant condition or situation that kept you from feeding those of us who paid quite handsomely for a higher level of service on this flight, it was not made apparent to us the passengers. You would think that, had there been a good reason for the absence—a fire in the warehouse that holds the airline meals, a food preparer’s strike, some sort of ancient mummy’s curse—we would have been made aware of it, in an effort to placate us. Even if this were to be true, I think the very least we could have expected from US Airways would have been hefty meal vouchers with which to purchase our in-flight meals on the ground.

This leads me to suspect that there was no particular reason for this omission, that it was most likely a case of “100% full flight – any complimentary food = more money for US Airways”.

I have to say that this experience has left me uninspired by your customer service. This is particularly ironic because I had actually been defending US Airways during my stay in Pennsylvania, countering the horror stories told by some of my relatives with our own quite favorable experience on the outbound trip. I would be interested to know if your company might wish to make some sort of amends for this less-than-First-Class service. I look forward to your reply.

Regards,

Andrew Lenzer