Recently I took two Finnair flight. One was 10 hours and one 3 hours. I wanted the vegetarian (VLML Vegetarian Lacto-Ovo Meal) meals. It was not possible to request them when booking the flight tickets on the Finnair website so I had to phone their call centre.
I told the lady that I wanted the VLML meal. It is best to be specific and say VLML rather than ‘vegetarian’ if you want this specific meal as there are several other types of vegetarian meal available (such as VGML Vegan and AVML Asian vegetarian). She confirmed that she had requested the meals and I should shortly receive an email confirming this.
A minute later I got the email. I printed this out so I could take it on the flights as proof of my request just in case there were any problems.
Meal 1 – Flight 1
This first meal (maybe lunch but it is hard to tell when you are travelling through timezones!) was pasta, mushrooms, carrots and some kind of tomato sauce. There was also a salad, some fruit, and some lemony mushrooms. As always on these flights is a roll of white bread. It tasted pretty good for an airline meal.
Meal 2 – Flight 1
Dinner was gnocchi in tomato sauce (with a whole tomato as well) and broccoli which all tasted good. A slightly odd jelly and the usual bread roll finished it off.
Snack – Flight 2
The snack on my second flight was falafel in rice, with some kind of tomato sauce. A bread roll and a boiled sweet was given as well. I noticed that this meal was both VLML and VGML – meaning it was vegan.
General experience
Over the past year I’ve had 6 vegetarian VLML meals on Finnair flights (all economy BTW). On 5 of those meals the VLML meals was brought to me without them having to remind them. They obviously have a record of which seats have ordered the special meals (if you stick in your allocated seat you are more likely to get your requested meal). On just one of the flights did I need to remind them that I had ordered the VLML meal.
The quality of the meals is pretty good for an economy airline meal. It was easy to order the meals over the phone – but it would have been even easier if the option was integrated into their ticket booking system.
