Here’s an interesting question: Is it an airline’s responsibility to make sure your child doesn’t go hungry on a long-haul flight? Because while you might think that a national flag carrier will have plenty of food available on a seven-hour flight, Maria Beydoun discovered the hard way that this isn’t necessarily the case.
And Maria is certainly no stranger to travel. In fact, the travel influencer has amassed more than 107,000 followers on Instagram, where she shares her family’s travel escapades from Beirut to Berlin, Spain to Turkey, and everywhere else in between.
Using the name ‘travel.with.juniors’ on Instagram, Maria has become a trusted name for parents to get family-friendly travel advice, but even she can get occasionally caught out – this time, at the hands of Finnair.
Maria and her family, including a young son and daughter, had decided to travel to Lapland from Dubai, where they live, and given that Finnair is the only airline to fly to Finland from Dubai, it made sense for them to travel with Finnair.
The journey to Finland passed off without incident, but on their return flight, Maria discovered a big issue with Finnair’s onboard service.
“On the Helsinki–Dubai leg alone (8 hours), you only get one complimentary meal, and everything else has to be purchased… which I thought, okay, fine — at least there won’t be drunk passengers since they don’t serve free-flowing alcohol,” Maria explains.
“But then my son woke up from his nap 40 minutes before landing — starving, because the complimentary lunch was served right at take-off (six hours earlier). We’d been traveling all day, and I just wanted to buy him something.”
Unlike many ‘full-service’ airlines, Finnair does not provide a second meal to Economy Class passengers on long-haul flights between its hub in Helsinki and Dubai.
Although the flight clocks in at nearly seven hours, there are also no complimentary snacks available, and instead, passengers must purchase items from the ‘buy on board’ menu.
Maria was more than happy to purchase a snack to keep her son from getting hungry, but, as she explains, “The crew refused because they had ‘closed the service.’ Nothing they could offer — not even a piece of bread or a muffin. The seatbelt sign wasn’t even on.”
Of course, this isn’t Maria’s first rodeo, and, as she explains, she normally packs snacks in her carry-on just in case her children get peckish. But, as this was the return flight, she hadn’t been able to restock, so she was empty-handed.
Finnair reached out to Maria on Instagram but confirmed that the crew was following protocol, explaining that they start to prepare the plane for landing around 45 minutes prior to arrival, and, at this point, the on-board snack shop is closed.
While this might seem a pretty unique situation, the growing number of low-cost, long-haul airlines means that families could easily find themselves in a similar situation.
And then consider there are a variety of reasons why even some of the best full-service airlines in the world might not be able to provide food at the point your child gets hungry, whether that be due to turbulence, crew rest requirements, or even a faulty food chiller.
So what should you be doing to avoid this kind of awkward situation? Well, it might sound obvious, but packing plenty of ambient snacks is a tip that cannot be stressed enough.
Whether you are traveling with young ones or a fully grown adult, make sure you have some sort of grab-and-go option that can tide you over in a pinch. Always think to yourself: an airplane is not a flying supermarket!
That might, unfortunately, mean buying snacks from an overpriced airport concession, but I’ll be honest with you, I would rather that than rely on an airline to keep me fed and watered for the duration of a flight.
