American Airlines has so much extra wine that it is starting a delivery service | Hacker News Reader

American Airlines has so much extra wine that it is starting a delivery service

cnn.com

51 pointsautoditype45 comments

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99$ for 3 bottles from American Airlines a month? I'm struggling to understand who the target market is.

https://www.vinesse.com/afc/collection.cfm?lv=ctall&cri=All%...

People who want some pretty decent reasonable wines at a 30% discount?

There's no decent or indecent wine. Nobody can tell a $500 wine from $10 wine in a blind tasting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting

There is definitely good wine and not so good wine, if you define "good" as something you like.

I could believe that there is a tenuous link between price and quality, but that's not the same as saying there is no good wine.

Have a friend hold a blind tasting for you.

Did that to a couple of headstrong wine people, they were unable to tell their favorite (chardonnay for one and shiraz for another) from a bunch of AUD7 bottles.

My wife and I accidentally did an experiment the other day. Grabbed a random bottle we got as a gift to drink with our pizza. It was a cab sauv which is a wine we usually don’t care for. We both were surprised at how much we did like it and how smooth it was. The next day we were shopping at target and saw it was an $85 bottle of wine.

Not sure if we could have told it from a $40 bottle, but it certainly stood head and shoulders above the $20 bottles we typically buy.

There can be such a wide range of different wines within « chardonnay » and « Shiraz » that saying one of the two is you « favorite wine » is meaningless. Hence the outcome of this blind testing.

You are making a much stronger assertion than is supported by your link

>...the objective evaluation of large numbers of wines as currently attempted at wine competitions is, he asserts, "beyond human ability".

Wine experts also can't tell if they're tasting 3 glasses from the same bottle.

I don't mean to say you can't stuff up a batch of wine, but basically everything that made it to the store in the current state of quality control is good enough to not be told apart by anyone.

> Wine experts also can't tell if they're tasting 3 glasses from the same bottle.

No. It is possible to select three different wines that even people with excellent palettes can't really differentiate between, and it is possible with some suggestion to make people believe the same wine is different wines. It is also true that some wine "experts" have terrible palettes.

That is not the same piece of information as "wine experts also can't tell if they're tasting 3 glasses from the same bottle".

I'm referring to this paper quote in the wikipedia article:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...

They literally fed the same judges the same wine in multiple glasses and got different scores.

I took that to mean the high volume in competition affects the consistency of the results

Nothing in the link you posted supports your assertion.

95% of people are also unable to tell the difference between a secure properly e2e encrypted chat, and an insecure chat.

Does that mean that there is no insecure and secure chat softwares?

Yeah, alcohol quality shows itself off the next morning when waking up not in pain, for me.

With e2e vs insecure, there is an objective differentiating factor, while in wine (apart from price, there apparently isn’t).

To leverage your example, it would be like selling “secure e2e chat” (label) at a high price, although it uses insecure tech.

If people claimed that e2e encrypted chats were more enjoyable, you may have had a point.

This looks comparable to other monthly wine subscriptions. For example, Bright Cellars' subscription was $80+S+H+tax for 4 bottles a month, with regular upsell emails for a 6-pack or 12-pack or a box of cheese.

It looks like American Airlines has had a partnership with Vinesse dating back to at least 2017: https://thepointsguy.com/2017/11/review-vinesse-wine-club-wo....

It looks like what's new is that they've slapped the Flagship brand on it, and given it a nice story to go with it.

Qantas (the flagship Australian airline) has done this for years: https://wine.qantas.com/

I have received far more emails from them since covid though with "special deals" that don't seem that fantastic.

Interestingly, I've also seen airline food kitchens starting to do home-delivery: https://www.gategourmetmeals.com.au/meals --> they sell packs of e.g. 4 microwave meals for ~$15.

This seems like The Onion. Airplane wine has always been pretty terrible to me and only purchased due to being stuck in a plane with nowhere else to go.

Not sure how this will make more than just liquidating and eating the loss.

I had some of the best wines in the world while flying. Not on AA though.

Emirates or Etihad or something? Some first class cabins seem to have nicer food + wine than most restaurants.

Singapore Air. Some of the best champagne I’ve ever had.

I've heard they're a great airline also. Hope to fly with them some day.

SQ Suites is definitely one of the best soft products in the sky. Dom and Krug aside, they even go over the top for coffee. First time I’ve had Jamaican Blue Mountain served in flight.

Agreed. I'll go out of my way to fly SQ because the experience is so good compared to someone like United.

> Airplane wine has always been pretty terrible to me and only purchased

If you're having to pay for the wine, you're not flying in the cabin where they have the good wines.

At least on American domestic flights the free wine in first is the same crappy wine you pay for In economy.

There are physiological reasons for poorer tasting food and beverages in-flight. Even if the wine is good, the changes in air pressure and environment can affect the taste, a lot.

Try Air France in business or first.

$50,000 in sales? How could that possibly be worth it for them.

Yes, I know the article says they "want to engage with customers", but that's hardly enough money to make that worthwhile.

-$50,000 is probably less than an ad on CNN.com would have cost, so I guess they come out ahead.

On top of that - avgeeks will buy up ANYTHING plane related, so there's an easy market to serve there

Maybe a trial. See how it goes and expand if it's successful.

one wonders whether it's literally about the marketing placement that this article gives them. I'm not in marketing, but I somehow wouldn't be surprised if this was worth more than $50,000 in "free" marketing.

Well if you’re the guy buying and managing wine for AA, maybe you have some extra time on your hands and some extra pallets of wine given the circumstances. So rather than be axed by management, why not propose a wacky wine club promo? This article alone could have saved a couple of people their jobs. And honestly, rightly so. $50k is not a lot in the grand scheme of things for an airline, but it just may patch a hole in the budget of ‘wine division’ of the AA catering subsidiary, or something to that effect. I’m sure it’s a modest coup for someone. I doubt it was dreamt up by the CEO and discussed at board meetings as a way to save the company or anything.

So, so much this. When it comes to how companies make money, people focus on the forest and can miss out on how each individual tree is a part of it. Will one missed tree damage the company? Probably not. But it's still a sum of all of them, and those individual trees are probably supporting a few people.

To give some context to your comment, Lufthansa is currently losing €1 million every two hours.

https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-costs-500-000-per-hour/

The same guy is running it as the one who was responsible for removing the olive from the in flight salad.

United sent me (a Global Services level customer) a case of wine last month as a "token of their appreciation". Now I know why! They're just purging inventory.

Well, given that apparently their other options was to start a wine club and sell it, take it as a sign they really like you as a customer?

United already has a wine club

Buying airline wine reminds me of how hotel chains have product catalogs; you could buy the Westin "Heavenly Bed" mattress or their branded soap/shampoo.

I used to be on an 80% travel job for work and that stuff would've been the last thing I wanted for home.

An argument could be made that if you are traveling that much, the hotel mattress becomes the one you get used to and your mattress at home becomes the odd one. Why not have the same one in both cases?

Didn’t that whole thing start to give people an alternative to... er... taking “souvenirs” of hotel property during their stay?

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