JetBlue Trashes Its Trays for Food and Drink Carts

JetBlue appears to be heading in the direction of classic meal and drink service. It announced that it will be getting rid of its drink trays in favor of more traditional drink and food carts.

This should cut the amount of time it takes to serve passengers in half, Doug McGraw a spokesman for JetBlue told Bloomberg. It will allow the airline to offer snack and drink service on 95% of its flights. Right now, flight attendants take orders in the aisles and then have to return to the passengers after retrieving their drinks and food from the galley. Crew members will continue to hand out free snacks from snack baskets.

The change stems from JetBlue's retrofit of its A320 cabins. It had to switch to smaller "Space Flex" galleys to make space for the increased number of seats the aircraft will have. In testing of the new design, flight attendants favored serving food and beverages from a cart.

JetBlue will start switching to carts in late April — and hopefully it will “mitigate some of the pain points with the Flex [galleys]” JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said to employees last week.

“Do I love the fact that we had to go to Space Flex?” Hayes asked. “No, I’ll be honest — of course not. It creates a much bigger challenge for our crew members to provide that service.”

Southwest will be the last major US airline to serve food and drinks on trays. Carts were already installed on JetBlue aircraft but were reserved for storing drinks and other supplies. The new carts are designed by JetBlue employees and are smaller than a traditional cart.

H/T: Bloomberg