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In the future of aviation, more peckish passengers may be able to rise from their seats and snag a snack without the help of a flight attendant.

Starting Thursday, United will become the latest airline to offer grab-and-go stations for economy fliers. The service will begin with select routes from Chicago O’Hare International Airport as part of the rollout of United’s new Airbus A321neo plane.

According to United, these kiosks will include a “limited supply of water and the snacks offered during the complimentary service,” with items such as fruit bars from That’s It, Undercover chocolate quinoa crisps and Savory snack mix. Those items will become available only after flight attendants have made their first pass, United said.

These self-serve stations are just the most recent iteration from a major U.S. airline on long- and medium-haul domestic flights. The JetBlue Pantry has been available since 2014, when it was called “The Marketplace.” It was rebranded in 2019, when JetBlue introduced the Airbus A321neo. Self-serve snacks are now offered on some of the “aircraft that fly JetBlue’s longest flight routes,” including an A321ceo, according to an airline representative.

“Passengers really like this. And when passengers are happy, the crew is happy, and when the crew is happy, passengers are happier,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and the president of the research and advisory firm Atmosphere Research Group. The do-it-yourself snack stations, he added, “make it easier for passengers to have more enjoyable flights, and to reduce the burden on the cabin crew having to run back and forth to serve individual passengers.”

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Not all experts agree, however, that self-service snacks have the customer’s best interest in mind.

Robert W. Mann, an airline industry analyst and consultant, called the new feature “the latest airline manifestation” of self-service options.

Mann gave the example of Delta and American Airlines, who, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, provided grab-and-go meal bags at the gate before boarding. “These days, those amenities seem generous, though at the time they replaced hot entrees served in the cabin,” Mann said. He added that both the American “Bistro Bag” and Delta “Sky Deli” options were “pretty much panned if not reviled by passengers.”

United and JetBlue’s all-plane snack stations can be read as part of a longer trend toward airline optimization (and consequent cost-cutting). “The self-service is part of a broader trend just in customer service overall. And you see it across other parts of the airline as well,” said Clark Johns, an airline expert and consultant at Alton Aviation Consultancy. It’s evident from airline investment in self-service mobile apps for check-in and flight management, as well as the spread of self-bag-check kiosks, he said.

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“It’s sort of a good utilization as well of the cabin crew’s time to give more touchpoints and time to those customers that need it,” Johns added.

Harteveldt agreed. “What these self-service pantries do is help the airlines do a better job of pleasing customers,” he said, calling it “empowerment to the passenger.”

Experts agreed that more traditional refreshment service probably won’t change in the near future. Flight attendants still need to serve alcohol and hot meals, after all. But a more widespread adoption of snack bars could reduce strain on the flight crew in the long term.

“It likely depends on costs, customer acceptance, comments and flight attendant post-flight write-ups,” Mann said. He cautioned, though, that such a change could be “an inconvenience [or] annoyance to customers, especially aisle-seat customers, sitting close to galleys where other passengers queue up in the aisles to ‘grab and go’ back to their own seats.”

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U.S. airlines are generally already working with the minimum number of flight attendants per trip, Harteveldt said. For safety reasons, the Federal Aviation Administration requires one flight attendant for every 50 passengers. That means there’s not as much room to cut staff as there would be with the installation of self-service check-in and bag-tagging machines at the airport, for example.

Whether more airlines take the leap to add self-service snack bars on their domestic flights is still up in the air. Having such a service takes up precious real estate on planes; some of American Airlines’ A321neos, for example, use spare mid-cabin space for an extra bathroom instead.

On newer aircraft, such as the A321neo or the Bombardier CRJ-550, a 50-person plane that United uses for its most premium routes, a trend toward more flexible configurations makes these types of self-services possible, potentially opening the door for more airlines to join the trend as they add new planes.

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In the meantime, having these self-service stations on select airlines could help separate them from competitors. According to Harteveldt, it is a “small but meaningful point of differentiation in an industry that long ago became a homogenous blob of sameness.”

Research has shown that even the most loyal fliers are often picking the airline they’ll fly on “trip to trip,” Harteveldt said. Features such as free WiFi, better in-flight entertainment or on-demand snack options, though they seem small, can add up from a customer’s point of view.

“Where 80 to 90 percent of what an airline does is the same between airlines — especially ones like JetBlue and United — that puts an awful lot of importance on the remaining 10 or 20 percent to help stand out from key competitors,” he said. “If part of that differentiation is a self-service pantry, then so be it.”

correction

A previous version of this article used the wrong first name for Henry Harteveldt. This version has been corrected.

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