ABOVE THE CLOUDS, AROUND THE TABLE: VACS WELCOMES ANA TRAVEL PARTNERS ON 3RD JULY 2026

A Different Kind of Meeting

Travel agents sell the experience of flying long before a passenger ever reaches the airport — the seat, the service, and yes, the meal. Yet for most of All Nippon Airways' (ANA) sales partners in Ho Chi Minh City, the catering behind that meal has always remained out of sight, somewhere between the tarmac and the trolley. Vietnam Airlines Caterers Ltd. (VACS) set out to change that.



Held at the VACS facility at Tan Son Nhat International Airport (SGN), the function brought together ANA's sales agents, the airline's Representative & General Manager, and members of the VACS commercial, quality, and culinary teams for an afternoon built around one goal: giving the people who sell ANA flights a first-hand look at - and taste of - the catering standards behind them.



The afternoon opened with an interactive quiz on ANA's history, service philosophy, and route network, with agents competing in small teams over questions that ranged from the airline's founding decades to its inflight service culture.

Agents were then led on a guided tour of the VACS production kitchen, walking through the cold preparation, cooking, and tray-set areas to see first-hand the hygiene protocols, temperature checks, and staging systems that keep production consistent at scale. For a group used to selling the finished experience, seeing the operation behind it gave the visit a sense of scale and discipline no presentation alone could convey — and set the stage for the VACS Executive Chef's talk that followed.

The Chef walked agents through what sets airline catering apart from restaurant cooking. On the ground, a dish is plated and served within minutes; in the air, it must survive a chill, a multi-hour hold, and a galley reheat before reaching a cabin where lower pressure and drier air dull the passenger's sense of taste and smell — which is why airline chefs deliberately adjust salt, acidity, and spice to compensate.

The General Manager of ANA's Ho Chi Minh City office thanked the sales agents for setting aside time to attend, framing the event as part of an ongoing partnership between ANA and VACS to keep agents equipped with the knowledge to speak confidently about the product they represent.

The event closed with agents sampling dishes taken directly from ANA's current inflight menu — the same trays, plating, and recipes served in the cabin. For many, it was the first time connecting a dish they had only read about on a menu card to an actual meal in front of them: a chance to taste, rather than simply take on faith, the standard VACS holds for one of its key airline partners.



For VACS, opening its kitchen to ANA's sales network — through the tour, the Chef's insights, and the tasting — turns an abstract promise of "quality catering" into something agents have walked through, seen, and tasted for themselves. For ANA, better-informed agents mean a sales force that can speak with more confidence and accuracy about the onboard experience they're selling. As VACS looks toward its next chapter, including the upcoming facility at Long Thanh International Airport, this kind of direct engagement with airline partners will remain central to how the company builds trust — not only through the meals it delivers to the aircraft, but through the relationships it builds on the ground.