Each week, my Meal of the Week feature examines an airline meal from my travels over the years. This may be a meal from earlier in the week or it may be a meal served over a decade ago.
I certainly miss bmi (British Midland International), a former British airline and Star Alliance member that was acquired by British Airways in 2012. Not that I flew it much…
The airline’s real value was in its Diamond Club loyalty program, which offered tremendous values on redemptions around the world and helped to influence some of the sweet spots in BA’s current Executive Club pricing scheme. I held Gold status with bmi for several years, but did not renew it when it became clear the program would no longer exist in 2012.
That’s a shame because every year I received upgrade coupons I could not use. Finally, in 2012, I had my first chance to fly bmi: from London to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan via Baku, Azerbaijan. Sadly, by then my upgrade coupons from the previous year had just expired and I spent the flight economy class even though business class was virtually empty. At least the economy class seats were fairly comfortable.
We departed London in the late morning and lunch was served after takeoff. It included chicken with potatoes and chickpea salad. I’d describe as the quintessential mass-produced 1950’s frozen dinner.
The flight landed in Baku before continuing to Bishkek. After we took off again, a second meal was served, this time vegetarian pasta with cake.
Neither meal was healthy or tasty…sadly this flight is how I will forever remember bmi catering.
CONCLUSION
Writing about this brings back so many memories about bmi redemptions over the years. Boy do I miss this program. The food…not so much.
That cake looks absolutely dreadful. I thought it was a giant piece of SPAM from the photo!
My only memory of BMI is nearly getting stranded in AMS on the way to Chennai about 20 years ago. After initially telling us they would do nothing for us since it was weather related, my groveling resulted in a phone call to BA, which had a flight going to London a few minutes later. Fortunately BA took pity on us since we were connecting on them via LHR and put us on.
Dreadful cakes used to be a feature of economy catering, often lurid , always that gelatinous top , invariably full of sugar. I have a certain nostalgia for them.
@ Matthew — Oh, how I miss bmi. 😉
I was thinking of you as I wrote this post!
At least there was some food. At one point they switched to all buy-on-board in economy. At least when I flew with them LHR-AMS. Granted, actual fare was $9 round trip with some $75 in taxes….
The interior shots look like one of the BMed Airbuses that BD acquired when they took over. They had been used for a BA franchise operation for quite a few years and were in BA colours and had standard BA shorthaul cabins which BD did not upgrade to their usual standard though they were painted in BD post 2000 colours i.e. BMI.
Ironically those same A321s were eventually refurbished after BA bought BD with the product BD had specified for their new mid-haul cabin and to this day they are still flying. G-MEDF is an example of one that has done the rounds of BMed for BA, BD and back to BA now with the new BD interior. Some of the A321s have been enhanced recently and now have the ultra-dense BA shorthaul cabin which I haven’t experienced but by all accounts it’s one to avoid.
Whatever about the branding and although I liked the colours post 2000 I think the bmi branding was ill conceived as apparently until LH bought them it did not stand for anything and they were just bmi, it was LH who determined it meant british midland international though to the end their legal trading name was British Midland Airways Ltd.
I have many good memories of it and the great people who worked there, My first ever flight was in 1966 on a BAC1-11 from MME-LHR, their first domestic service to London. The 1-11s were short lived and too costly to run and they reverted to a fleet of Viscounts not returning to use jets for quite a few years but when they did it was DC9-10s which were certainly an experience and a far cry from the A320s at the end.