It is still the case on transatlantic flights that a drinks trolley comes to even the farthest reaches of Economy. If you’re lucky, the gay man or imposing Essex girl wheeling it will, with a wink and a smile, palmed you over an extra mini bottle of gin or a wine for the meal. They can tell who will be a good, and who a bad, plane drinker.
I like to think of myself as the former. I am not someone who drinks to get drunk. Yet that initial buzz from a lemony Bombay Sapphire and Fever Tree glugged through ice is hard to beat. It’s an empowering, controlled, merrymaking high. In the wrong person, this buzz causes unwanted chattiness, but in my case it makes me sit back in my cramped seat and think pulsing, magisterial thoughts about the wonders of modern life. That’s the G&T effect. The wine with the meal mellows it out, creating the conditions for a more relaxed middle stretch of the flight, with the possibility of a snooze.
If this is all possible in Economy, then Business offers a more concentrated form of such pleasure. The few times I have turned left, the glass of Lanson or Pol Roger offered while still on the runway – to say nothing of the top-ups available for the next seven to 12 hours – can have a positively stratospheric effect. Normally it is hell to talk to a fellow passenger, but over a glass of champagne, especially in a neutral space away from the sanctuary of the seat, it becomes truly good fun. Some of the jolliest times of my teenage life involved sipping cups of wine at the back of the plane with fellow (Economy) travellers as indulgent flight attendants looked on.
All of which is why I am surprised by the direction of Virgin Atlantic, which is redesigning its premium cabin to be less, not more, booze friendly. The bar is being removed thanks to the sterile desires of Gen Z, who apparently want wifi and break-out spaces, not a place to sit and drink with handsome strangers. An AI-powered virtual concierge service will snatch up whatever it is these new flyers want and have it brought to them without the need for any human interaction. Who needs a martini or a glass of Veuve at the bar in the Virgin upper-class cabin when you could have a Zoom-based business meeting?
So farewell to the Virgin bar, which is going the same way as pedicures and in-seat massages. Such perks, which helped make Branson’s brand fantastically successful, belonged to loucher times, when Cool Britannia rode the skies and life wasn’t all about collagen smoothies and matcha eye masks.
Shai Weiss, Virgin Atlantic’s CEO, is clearly of a different generation and mourns the end of the old approach to flying. Of bars and massages, he says, ‘I would love to do a lot of this stuff but that would be clinging on to the past and we are a forward-looking company’. This is the right course of action based on statistics showing Gen Z don’t drink as much as their elders. They are known for their social anxiety and their sobriety, though with a predilection for hard drugs.
Perhaps Virgin has moved with the times too soon, and its new clientele will demand a return of the bar
Observation of young associates and relatives supports these figures, though it’s clear there’s a hiccup. While the fundamentals remain the same – Gen-Z are a sensitive, allergy-prone, health-conscious, fraidy-cat generation compared to their elders – some new research suggests that when it comes to inebriation, their love of retro is asserting itself.
Following on from its love affair with pints of Guinness, Gen-Z is suddenly ‘discovering’ the joys of alcohol more generally. A recent survey has found that in the past two years, the proportion of Gen Z drinkers has gone from two thirds to three quarters. This is happening at the same time as other big returns, such as irony (hideous websites that look like early beta versions but that sell, for instance, viral streetwear); conservatism, cooking, cheerleading, and big boobs. Other examples of this impulse include the meteoric rise of cookies ‘n’ cream girl-next-door actress Sydney Sweeney, whose plainness and curves have made her a cult favourite; Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift as a trad high school couple, and, of course, wag-core: dressing and doing makeup like lady football aristocracy Posh, Colleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy.
Perhaps Virgin has moved with the times too soon, and its new clientele will demand a return of the bar, as they discover the immense pleasures of intoxication, and feeling your feelings, in the skies. Feeling high on life while watching back to back episodes of Friends, a few gin and tonics in, or a chat with an AI? Surely, if they can rediscover bad websites and Guinness, they’ll find their way to ‘rediscovering’ real fun at altitude, and soon.
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