Lufthansa flight attendants want passengers to pay for special meals

Lufthansa flight attendants want people to pay extra for special meals, in an attempt to dissuade people from ordering them. AeroTelegraph reported the flight attendants are frustrated by the volume of special meals that passengers are ordering. The airline offers 11 different special meals to its passengers, including gluten-intolerant meals, low-cholesterol and low-sodium meals and vegetarian and vegan. A Lufthansa's cabin staff representative said up to 190 guests would order a special menu on long-haul flights. This is an “excessive amount,” she complained in a letter. Special menus are usually handed out to passengers before the standard meals. The individual menus at Lufthansa were reportedly not labelled with the passenger’s name or the seat. This makes distribution even more complex, especially since 100 special menus are now quite normal, as Lufthansa flight attendants said. The flight attendant staff representative suggested limiting the amount of special meals per flight, or limiting the selection to options that are religiously or health-related. In addition, the right to a special menu should be recorded on the boarding pass so that there were no endless discussions. She also wanted the costs for the additional effort to be charged to the passenger. The staff representative complained that the topic was discussed with management for the first time in 2017, but there seems to have been no “real interest in really seriously solving this issue”.<br/>