As a customer it was great. Everyone was either sloshed or going home with a stack of miniatures in their pockets (someone at the next table even left with three quarters of a bottle of wine!), but I can't see how it's sustainable.
Experiences will always vary, but my experience of LNER, and VTEC before it, is that they are not like that anymore. They
used to be like that in East Coast days, but not any longer. The first thing David Horne did when he came in at VTEC was nickel-and-dime the niceties away, even the wine glasses got smaller.
That's actually how airlines do it as well, would be amazed how much it makes first class worth while in some people's minds.
Absolutely, because of the significant difference between the wholesale price of an item and the retail price of an item.
A 5cl miniature bottle of Gordon's gin will cost about £1.50-£2 from a standard wholesaler like Matthew Clark. If you can chuck massive volume at the wholesaler, which the airlines and the train companies can do, you'll probably get it even cheaper. It is the same with other entry-level spirits such as Bells or Famous Grouse.
So in the example above, someone paid £30 extra to go in first class and maybe had four 5cl bottles of spirits during the journey. The retail cost of four double gins would be what, £25, and so the passenger feels like they've just had a bloody good deal. But wholesale those four 5cl bottles of gin won't have cost LNER much more than about six quid.
This works all the way up the food chain. People might pay £1500 extra to fly Business Class on Emirates and they'll get access to wines which retail at £200+ a bottle. But given the bulk purchasing power of Emirates, the airline won't be paying wholesale anywhere near what the retail price of the wine is. But people make their value decisions based on the retail value, not the wholesale value.
