National carrier or budget airline? Qantas’s food cutbacks leave vegetarians hungry

Is Qantas even pretending to be a full service airline any more? The latest wheeze from Alan Joyce’s giant travel lottery system is to in effect tell vegetarians, people with diet restrictions and travellers of faith to forget about being fed because the only thing they’ll get is meat.

Regular business traveller John Dee discovered recently that Qantas has adopted a “one-size-fits-all” approach to food on its regularly delayed flights: only meat — no kosher, gluten-free or halal options.

A Qantas spokesperson confirmed to Crikey: “For domestic flights shorter than 3.5 hours in Economy Class, Qantas offers a single refreshment option per flight, such as a chicken pie or a zucchini and onion frittata. If the option on a particular flight is not suitable for vegetarians, we try to offer an alternative of a small sweet or savoury snack, which is vegetarian.”

And it’s true that on shorter legs there are sort of non-meat options — you can have some crackers and shrink-wrapped cheese or a small refrigerated muffin as you “sit back, relax and enjoy the service”. In fact, that’s all you’ll get. If that isn’t to your liking or you can’t stomach gluten, bad luck. Qantas seems to think its default passenger is some red-blooded Aussie who loves chowing down on flesh.

Qantas’ contempt for its workers — who it’s seeking to punish with big real wage cuts after illegally sacking 1700 of them during the pandemic — is clearly filtering through to its view of its passengers, who can look forward to delayed or cancelled flights on its ageing aircraft, losing their bags to some purgatorial airline dead zone, and not being able to eat if they prefer not to consume animals, or are people of faith with specific dietary requirements. And all for significantly higher fares.

Such is the extent of the awfulness of the experience of travelling on Qantas that there’s now a real question of whether there are any areas of the airline’s service left to be trashed, as a once-proud “national carrier” completes its descent to the levels of a budget airline plying the smaller routes of a developing country.

From the huge queues at check-in (which are your fault, Joyce said) through to the lottery of waiting to see if your bag makes it out the other end, Qantas seems to have gone out of its way to make the whole travel experience as much of an ordeal as possible. Only the long-suffering air crews, reduced to handing out Jatz and cheese and asking if you’d like some water with that, continue to try to cling to some standards of decent service — and are told to cop big wage cuts for their efforts.

This article was first published by Crikey.