Airline bosses have tried to keep the in-flight food faux pas under wraps
British Airways has stopped serving meals for its business-class customers at London City Airport after a major catering blunder.
For a month, business-class flyers were left without on-board meals after a new catering contract for flights to and from the airport fell through.
The airline confirmed this weekend they had suspended business-class catering for their Cityflyer subsidiary for the month of July and issued an apology to those affected.
It assured normal on-flight meals would return "in the coming days" after the airline, for a month, had been issuing their flyers with a prepaid credit card to buy food at the terminal, The Sunday Times reports.
Business-class flyers were not left completely hungry, as "dry catering products", such as crisps, snacks and drinks, were offered on-board flights.
Economy passengers, who receive a complimentary drink and snack on the service, were consequently not impacted.
BA Cityflyer's target audience are business travellers who predominantly take short-haul flights.
The BA subsidiary predominantly operates from London City Airport, located in the east of the capital.
BA Cityflyer also serves a significant number of holidaymakers, operating routes to popular destinations such as Ibiza, Barcelona, Venice and Thessaloniki – where tickets can set you back £650 for a business-class return.
The airline's catering troubles trace back to a supplier switch made at the start of July.
BA Cityflyer moved from Newrest to Gate Gourmet – a change bosses had flagged as one of their five key priorities for the year.
Newrest, which supplies catering and cleaning services to airlines including Delta, United, Qatar Airways and Etihad, had held the BA contract at London City Airport since 2010.
Gate Gourmet was due to take over operations at the east London kitchen previously run by Newrest, but bureaucratic hold-ups meant it could not access the site until last week.
Airline executives tried bringing in meals from the other Gate Gourmet sites further away, but sources told The Sunday Times these were ruined in transit due to the heatwave.
A British Airways spokesman said: "Providing our customers with the high-quality catering they both deserve and expect is extremely important to us.
"When it became clear we couldn't consistently deliver that standard during the transition to a new catering provider at BA Cityflyer, we took the decision to temporarily suspend part of the onboard service."
She added affected customers had received apologies and goodwill gestures, including food vouchers and Avios points, with full catering due to resume within days.
