to do with taking the catering back in house. In fact if I was in
charge of BA I would be looking to outsource baggage handling.

Thank god you're not in charge. Just what we need these days is
some cut-costs-to-the-bone fly by night company running baggage
handling with security being tossed out the window in the name of
profits and baggage being treated even worse than it is now by
some just off the boat immigrants on minimum wage.

B2003

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:45:22 GMT, (Neil
Williams) wrote:

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 11:02:45 GMT, Chris Tolley

Why do you think those names are any more similar than, say, British
Railways, British Airways and British Waterways? Or C&A and B&Q? Or the
AA and the FA?

Because...

1. Their logos use similar colours, as I recall.
2. "xx Gourmet" strikes me as a less generic, and more trademarkable,
brand compared with "British" something or something "Association".
That said, all of the "British" organisations you note once were (or
in the latter case still are) nationalised and therefore were
connected.

Neil

It's part of Compass Group
(http://www.railgourmet.com/01-about/ABOUT_00.asp)

Dunno whether it was part of the same group in the past, though.

In message , Helen Deborah
Vecht writes

Paul Terry typed

I wish BA would simply drop the idea of serving food on flights of less
than three hours - the quality is generally awful these days, and eating
in such cramped conditions is no fun. I'd personally much rather make or
buy my own sandwich.

I'm afraid I disagree. I often have more than enough to carry without
lugging food and drink.

So why not buy a sandwich at the airport, after you have checked in your
baggage?

I'm usually hungry by the time I've spent a couple of hours travelling
to the airport and another couple of hours checking in, so it's 4 or 5
hours from the time I leave home until I'm airborne.

If you're having to spend two hours checking in, surely that would be a
good time to buy a sandwich - either eat it then, or take it in on board
once you've got rid of your baggage.

We only ever take cabin baggage when going on holiday, and we use auto
check-ins whenever possible, so we rarely wait more than an hour at the
airport (and don't wait at all at the far end) but that still leaves
ample time to get a meal, or at least a sandwich, before departure if we
haven't bothered to bring something with us.

Quite apart from the apparently enormously inflated prices BA pays for
food, the quality in recent years has been abysmal - last time I flew BA
I had what was supposed to be reheated scrambled egg on toast - it was
totally inedible. So was the replacement they fished out. What a waste
of money!

--
Paul Terry

Paul Terry wrote:
[snip]
I wish BA would simply drop the idea of serving food on flights of less
than three hours - the quality is generally awful these days, and eating
in such cramped conditions is no fun. I'd personally much rather make or
buy my own sandwich.

Not entirely true.

I had a marvellous fry up the last time I flew from London to Edinburgh.
It was quite the most impressive meal I've had on a journey on either
train or plane ever. Perfect bacon, scrambled eggs and some decent sausages.

Of course I didn't mind about the price - someone else paid.

--
alex @ http://nuttyxander.com/
* we taught ourselves to play the pots and pans so
that we would have something honest to dance to *

In message , Alex Ingram
writes

I had a marvellous fry up the last time I flew from London to
Edinburgh. It was quite the most impressive meal I've had on a journey
on either train or plane ever. Perfect bacon, scrambled eggs and some
decent sausages.

Bearing in mind that it would have been a re-heated fry-up, one can only
gasp in amazement.

Of course I didn't mind about the price - someone else paid.

And there's the rub. According to the BBC, the true cost of providing an
in-flight meal in British Airways ECONOMY CLASS is 12 pounds. I flew to
Venice for not much more than that a couple of years ago!

--
Paul Terry

Paul Terry wrote in uk.transport.london on Fri, 26 Aug 2005 08:05:03
+0100 :

In message , Alex Ingram
writes

I had a marvellous fry up the last time I flew from London to
Edinburgh. It was quite the most impressive meal I've had on a journey
on either train or plane ever. Perfect bacon, scrambled eggs and some
decent sausages.

Bearing in mind that it would have been a re-heated fry-up, one can only
gasp in amazement.

Friend of mine tells a story of hearing an announcement that the
in-flight meal that day was deep-fried chicken.

It caused some slight consternation among passengers when the curtain
to the galley opened, and they saw a member of the crew unconcernedly
lowering the portions into a smoking deep-fat fryer.

Mind you, this was on a USSR internal Aeroflot flight.

--
baby-sitter
- one who mounts guard over a baby to
relieve the usual attendant
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary

No, in fact there's a big protest planned this Sunday. Incidentally, having
seen some of the unfortunates queuing for Gate Gourmet jobs outside Blue
Arrow in Uxbridge, I wasn't surprised to see there's now an airport security
scare.
Incidentally, I reckon if the sacked workers could get into the terminal
they could do a good trade in take-aways. Past experience of strikes in this
part of London is that the food on the picket lines can be a damn sight
better than anything the airlines provide.

"elyob" wrote in message
...
Not been past them, but the weather says to expect rain shortly. Will that
be the end of the protests?

Neil Williams wrote:

Do GG have anything to do with RailGourmet, out of interest? If not,
I wonder how such similar names ended up existing?

I had the same thought and, as usual, Google had the explanation. They
are two separate companies, but they have a common ancestry in the
Swissair group.

Rail Gourmet are part of Compass Group, the world's largest catering
organisation. Compass bought Rail Gourmet in 2001 from SAirLines AG, a
subsidiary of Swissair's SAir Group.

Gate Gourmet was sold by SAir Group to Texas Pacific Group in 2002.

I don't think that any aspect of the present dispute at GG reflects on
RG at all. (Unless of course you take the view that they're both big
nasty global corporations and therefore A Bad Thing [TM]. But then the
Competition Commission seems happy with Rail Gourmet - see
http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/reports/2002/470compass.htm.)
--
Joyce Whitchurch, Stalybridge, UK
=================================
Do something amazing. Give blood.
http://www.blood.co.uk/

On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 23:07:50 +0000 (UTC), Joyce Whitchurch
wrote:

I had the same thought and, as usual, Google had the explanation. They
are two separate companies, but they have a common ancestry in the
Swissair group.

Ah, I thought there might have been something, with the common colour
scheme in their logos and the similar names. Thanks.

Neil

--
Neil Williams in Milton Keynes, UK
When replying please use neil at the above domain
'wensleydale' is a spam trap and is not read.