When booking a Japan Airlines flight directly through the airline, you’ll see several bonus options offered for your trip on their clunky and slow booking site. Often, that’ll include a seat selection, a paid lounge service, and several choices for your meal for those with dietary restrictions or religious preferences.
For one of my upcoming JAL flights, I’m able to see several meal options like that, shown in the photo below. If you’re going with a regular meal, there’s no option to select a meal in advance, at least for economy and premium economy (I’m not fully sure about business, as I’ve only booked that one via AA).
Among these choices is an option called “JAL Meal Skip Option,” which literally is an option to cancel your meal service.
There isn’t much else to it; all it does is cancel your meal service. The airline claims the cancelled meal will be donated “…for school lunch projects for children in developing countries suffering from hunger.” I know some may question how much exactly is donated for each cancelled meal, and if this is more of a cost-cutting initiative. However, knowing Japan Airlines has had a strong partnership with UNICEF for a long time, I can kind of see why they would take it in this direction.
All of that said, from a pure passenger experience perspective, I don’t see how it makes sense to cancel a meal in advance. Sure, the biggest benefit is that you can sleep through a red-eye flight without being disturbed, but that’s assuming your travel plans go exactly the way you plan.
Let’s say your 21:00 departure gets delayed by 4 hours, and you leave at 01:00 instead. By then, you’ve been awake at an airport with most of the shops and restaurants closed, and you actually end up hungry by the time you board the flight. Now you might wish you hadn’t selected the “Meal Skip Option” 3 months ago.
It’s easy to imagine yourself sleeping through a night flight at the time of booking, but a lot can change during a trip. Unless you’ve done similar or the same flights many times and know for sure that you can go through it without a meal, I’d advise against this option.
Note that Japan Airlines flight attendants won’t disturb you if you’re asleep during meal service, and will leave a sticker on your IFE screen saying something like “Hey, you were asleep during your meal. Let us know if you want it when you wake up.” So if the staff won’t disturb you if you’re asleep during meal service anyway, there really isn’t an extra benefit for cancelling a meal in advance (the donation aspect of it aside).
Given there’s little extra benefit and the uncertainty of delays and changes in travel plans, I don’t think there’s a need to play around with the advance meal choices if you don’t have dietary or religious preferences.
Featured image by the author.
