Real answer? Because every little change to an airliner has to be approved by a lengthy and expensive process, and every tiny bit of weight they can avoid adding saves them money. American Airlines saved $40,000 a year by removing one olive from every first class salad, they’re not about to add weight back on for an extraneous little feature of dubious actual value.
Because the airline industry is a scam that has been running on bailouts for decades while never actually bothering to innovate or improve their service while at the same time funneling all the profits to stock buybacks.
But seriously in business class you can tell them if you want to be woken up or not and they’ll remember and respect it. Or course you can also probably get something to eat even if you missed meal service.
One time I flew with Emirates and they had a little pack on your seat that had stickers to put on the seatback in front - red that said let me sleep and green said wake me for a meal. Flew with them since and haven’t seen it again but I thought it was a great idea!
It would be better if you could just order the meal(s) from the start of the flight with an option to change them at any moment by using the screen in front of your seat.
It’s such a pain in the ass to have to be alert for when the attendants show up and also trying to understand which options they have when it all could just be shown on a screen on your language.
Honestly I feel any situation in which they put a touch screen near you, and have an ordering system should be done like this. Waay off topic but my local sonic has touch screens on all of their 50 pull in spots, that can only be used to turn through ads before you hit the button to talk to the person over the shitty half working intercom system.
If your flights have meal service and you’re actually able to sleep through anything, you’re on much nicer flights then i am. My flights are usually snack mix and water or soda.
Domestic flights are incredibly unlikely to have meal service (even if you want to pay for it)
International (more across oceans than Germany to France) flights generally will unless you are flying the most budget of budget airlines (who tend to not do international flights anyway).
And a lot of that is just logistics. If a flight is 6-10 hours then people are going to miss meals. Hungry people get hangry.
Took a transatlantic flight that had this functionality… it wasnt in the call button, but on the infotainment system. Instead of playing movies, you could set the screen to display one of those 2 options.
I don’t remember which, but on one of my flights, we were distributed eye masks with different colors on each side. If you were wearing the red color on the outside, it meant that you wanted to be left alone. Smart and yey, free eye mask!
Because flight attendants are dealing with high double digits (probably low triple digits if it is a flight with meal service) and don’t have time for individual passengers’ bullshit.
The time it takes to figure out who in a given row to ask and then the time to nudge them awake adds up REALLY fast and leads to the people in the back (well, middle) of the plane getting severely delayed service.
If you want a wake up call? Ask the person next to you to nudge you awake if you are asleep when meal service starts. I am 100% the kind of person who pops his headphones on and grabs a kindle or a steam deck the moment my row is seated. I have zero issues with someone asking me to nudge them when meal service starts.
Aha! Lucky me, since I am tall I don’t need the person next to me to wake me up, the attendants can simply bang the cart into my leg! (it hurts like a BITCH especially when you’re asleep.)