I am flying to New York with Aer Lingus in May. We finally booked our flights yesterday after debating who to fly with and chose Aer Lingus for a few reasons: We don’t have to back track to London or Amsterdam, flight times are good and decently priced, we have flown with them before and enjoyed the flights and they offer gluten free meals…
You can’t select your gluten free meal when booking the way you can with Virgin for example but there is a phone number to call if you need to make any special  meal requests. It’s a 10p a minute number so I made the call at work and I’m glad I did because I was on hold for 10 minutes before anyone answered. The woman who answered asked for my booking reference, confirmed my name and asked if it was just me who wanted a gluten free meal. She then put me on hold for another few minutes before confirming that a gluten free meal had been ordered on both my outbound and return flights. I was a bit concerned at this point considering I had only booked a one way flight!?! I told her this and she said she wasn’t sure what she was looking at but my meal on the Dublin-JFK flight would be gluten free. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes….
My special meal
UPDATE: I am happy to report that I got my gluten free meal as requested on my Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to JFK. Around an hour into
My gluten free lunch
the flight it was lunch time and as all of the ‘special people’ are served first, I received my ‘Gluten Free Coeliac meal’ of chicken in a tomato sauce with rice and veggies, a small salad, melon and a gluten free roll. Most of the meal was tasty and more importantly gluten free as I felt great afterwards. The roll was pretty rubbish and quite clearly gluten free as it was as hard as a brick but I was pleased with the rest of my meal.
Later on in the flight we were given a ‘light snack’ of a scone with butter and jam. At first I thought they had
In-flight gluten free scone
forgotten about me but a few minutes later a gluten free version of the same thing was put in front of me. Much tastier than the earlier bread and far less obviously gluten free, I happily munched on my gluten free scone whilst listening to Bon Jovi and playing mindless in flight games.
Conor
Mar 29th, 2010Interesting, being my national airline I am very interested to see how you get on with Aer Lingus, havent flown on them as a coeliac yet!! Done the JFK flight before, it aint too bad!
Recently flew Heathrow -> Bangkok on Thai Airways gluten free all the way, was pleasantly surprised with the quality even if one the air hostess gave me a bread role with my dinner 🙂
Am doing Auckland to Sydney and back next month, Jet Star out and Pacific Blue back, have ordered a gluten free meal when booking online, see how that goes!!
Enjoy…
NickB
May 8th, 2010Any update on this? Did you get the meal you ordered? Because of the Aer Lingus deal with Aer Arann has resulted in a link from some smaller UK airports to Dublin and on to New York and Boston, it is now an option for us later this year.
laura
May 8th, 2010My flight is is 2 weeks. I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll get my gluten free meal. I’ll definitely let you know…
Conor
May 13th, 2010Hey, I did my flight from Auckland to Sydney and back, JetStar out was rubbish, they just had the usual trolley “no-frills” crazy prices. Coming home I flew Pacific Blue, I expected this to be worse as they are quite a new airline, well for me anyway!
I was pleasantly surprised to find they had two dishes on their “no-fills” trolley, one was bun/bread thing and the other was pumpkin soup… Good to know, I will travel with them again hopefully to Perth and back in a few months 🙂
German
Nov 29th, 2011Here is my story.
We flew from JFK to Dublin on November 19.
We had a gluten free meal ordered for our 10 years old kid.
When we boarded the plane one of the crew members approached us to confirm the records.
Our kid got his meal ahead of us and started eating.
When we got our meals his meal was almost gone.
But I was shocked to see that we got served the same salad that our kid just ate. And it was a regular risotto.
Can you believe that? We called the crew member to report that. Sure, 30 minutes later my kid began complaining for belly sick and for the next three days he had diarrhea on the cruise just because of that risotto.
It is not the first time we fly and there were no problems with other airlines before.
Laura
Nov 30th, 2011German, that’s awful! Sorry to hear about your negative experience. What did the crew say when you told them about the mix up? I hope you got some form of compensation.
Jan
Dec 19th, 2012I too have flown on Aer Lingus to Ireland and enjoyed their gluten free meals. Thinking about flying with them again to Italy as it was a pleasure to fly with an airline that is friendly, good service, and I can eat good food safely.
Sharon
May 14th, 2013Love your website – I think it would be a good idea to have a page particularly for other posts about airlines and meals on planes. I have flown on many airlines – domestic and international flights and generally the coeliac meal is rubbish – boiled potatoes and steamed veges with poached chicken, no flavours, no salt or pepper sachets, no dessert unless you count a small bowl of watermelon with a couple of grapes as dessert, no rolls, definitely no crackers though I did have an unwrapped one on my gluten free meal and ate it – got sick. That one is still being discussed. The on-board menu on a number of airlines – gluten free offering? Oh that would be the chips or the corn chips. The soup was not gluten free to the person above – had flour thickening on my flight.
Laura
May 15th, 2013Thanks for sharing, Sharon! I will get working on a post about airlines and in-flight meals. Hopefully readers will share their experiences with different airlines and we can find out which airlines get it and which do not. 🙂