Last year, SWISS announced an economy class buy-on-board program on longhaul flights. Food and drink would remain complimentary, but could be upgraded to business class-style food and alcohol for a fee.
My colleague traveled from Los Angeles to Zurich earlier this week in economy class. I helped him out with seat assignments prior to the flight and noticed the choice to purchase several meals.
Here’s a look at the menu.
SWISS BOB Meal Choices
SWISS offered six meals for purchase, ranging in price from 29USD to 49USD.
Healthy Choice
Enjoy quinoa with avocado and almonds. For your main course, we will serve you grilled salmon with curried coconut and lime sauce, rice and leaf spinach. To finish, we will delight your palate with a chia seed pudding with blueberry compote and chopped cashew nuts.
Japanese Meal
Japanese elegance above the clouds. As your starter, we will serve you crevette, tuna, salmon, nigiri and California roll with soba noodles in a Bentobox. Your main course will be chicken teriyaki with Japanese rice. At the end, we will delight your palate with a dorayaki with azuki cake.
Swiss Traditional Meal
Enjoy culinary traditions with a selection of Swiss cheeses and pear bread as your starter. For your main course, we will serve you Zürcher Kalbsgeschnetzeltes (a traditional Swiss veal dish) with rösti, vegetables and flaked almonds. The dark chocolate mousse with raspberry compote will have you in seventh heaven.
Gourmet Meal
Your starter will be gravadlax with salmon tartar and fennel salad. The beef fillet with red wine jus is the main course, and it is served with potato gratin and seasonal vegetables. As the grand finale, you can delight your senses with our dark chocolate Opera torte.
Swiss Cold Cuts
Start your meal with a Swiss potato salad with Pommery mustard. For your main course, enjoy a selection of cold cuts with various cheeses, plus bread and mixed pickled vegetables. For dessert, you will be served carrot cake with Diplomat Cream (lighter version of crème patisserie).
Swiss Brunch
Swiss bircher muesli, fruit salad and plain yoghurt, plus a selection of Swiss cheeses and cold cuts, grilled tomato and bacon, scrambled egg with chives and potato wedges. Served with Zöpfli, croissant, dark bread with butter, honey and preserves.
Alcohol was also available for purchase for 19EUR/bottle.
CONCLUSION
Food in SWISS Business Class is generally good and this certainly represents an upgrade from the complimentary economy class meal. Nevertheless, it seems far too expensive to me for an airline meal.
Yikes – $29-49? Yeah, I have to agree, too rich for my tastes. The choices do look good, though.
I see a Swiss Brunch ($29.00) and Healthy Choice ($29.00) in my future, Matthew. Thanks for the good news. I’m flying Swiss BKK-ZRH-ORD to Chicago Seminars. Hope to see you there.
Yeah, I agree, the price seems ridiculously high…maybe if it INCLUDED a choice of the bottles of wine with the “meals”…but otherwise, seems awfully extravagant for what otherwise resembles the “book the cook” steak meal that cost half as much as the one shown here, on Aer Lingus for flights to/from Europe via their very nice Dublin hub we took two-years ago…
…and speaking of those Aer Lingus flights, the steaks, and the meals in general, were MUCH BETTER for the JFK-DUB trip (I know, shocking…) than the shoe leather and other glop we both got on the flight back from Dublin…to be fair, the return flight to JFK from DUB was delayed for about 2.5 hours…but still, at the approx $25 we paid, it was literally and figuratively difficult enough to swallow the dry as a bone shriveled up piece of shoe leather that ended up on our tray tables…had that prepaid meal cost $49 we would’ve have no choice but to send it back and demand a refund…
…and that’s the problem: there’s a risk that the meal received inflight may suffer from all of the nasty things that departure delays and altitude can inflict…and that’s for steak…the thought of actually ordering, and paying $49 for sushi on any airline other than JAL or ANA, strikes me as the one “rule” my father (who worked in the food & beverage industry in NYC) had when dining out: never order a steak at a seafood restaurant…and don’t order fish at a steakhouse!!!
As much of a risk that steak can arrive hammered by the time it reaches ones’ traytable however many hours after it was prepared in a caterer’s kitchen (with or without any other delays before being served inflight), the thought of sushi at any price on an airline with “Swiss” painted on the fuselage reminds me of my dad’s prohibition about ordering fish at a steakhouse …
Also, as a post script: it’s a wee bit “misleading” for Swiss to show the expertly “food styled” steak meal as the bait with the caveat “from USD 29.00” when the steak meal itself is a switch in price to $49, while the offerings that actually are available for $29 (a dainty brunch; something attempting to be passed off as an upscale cold cuts/charcuterie platter; or a “healthy choice” block of salmon that’s probably free of butter or some other flavorful rich sauce) are not exactly the type of meals steak lovers are likely to find enticing enough to want to buy up to…
…just sayin’
Alas, as with many other things these days, in “airlineland”, as elsewhere, truth in advertising seems to have fallen by the wayside…
Well if you were living in Switzerland, you would find those prices OK.
And in Economy, you get free wine in a small bottle, albeit not the one proposed for purchase, of course.
Also, those are not the meals served in business.
I just visited Zurich and find the prices obscene compared to Germany, France, and Italy. What a difference a border and currency makes…
Not only are these meals overpriced, but you also risk either a) feeling especially ripped off when your seat mate’s normal meal looks perfectly adequate, or b) provoking envy or scorn from said seat mate when your meal is noticeably nicer than theirs. The economy experience is bad enough without added resentment.
29$ by Swiss standards is completely reasonable price, i.e. same kind of meal in a restaurant in Zurich would likely cost even more.