Instagrammer Threatened With Criminal Charges for Posting Photo of Handwritten In-Flight Menu

Airlines often have little incentive to keep their food menus exciting as they’re pretty much dealing with a captive audience. One Instagrammer, however, is trying to keep them honest. Rius Vernanes, a self-described “miles geek” with over 100k followers, was flying business class on Garuda Indonesia last weekend when he was appalled by the in-flight food menu he was given. It was a handwritten (although very neatly written) menu on a sheet of spiral-bound paper — a shock to the expectations of anyone flying in business class. Vernanes posted a photo of the menu on his Instagram Story with the caption, “They told me the menu was still being printed,” and of course, it went viral.

Garuda Indonesia wasn’t amused. The airline responded that the menu was intended for use by the cabin crew and wasn’t meant for customers at all. They also took it one step further, announcing that they would consider banning all photos or videos aboard their flights, and if that wasn’t enough, they even tried prosecuting Vernanes for his photo. On Wednesday, he posted Instagram photos of two envelopes from a local police department telling him to come in for questioning. Apparently, airline employees had filed a police report accusing Vernandes of “using a negative perception… towards the country’s national flag carrier.”

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A post shared by Rius Vernandes (@rius.vernandes) on Jul 15, 2019 at 10:30pm PDT

To his followers, Vernanes wrote, “I hope you can help share and support me through this problem because I don’t want to see that, in the future, whenever we review something as is, whenever we give constructive criticism, we can be criminalized.”

The charges have since been dropped, and Garuda Indonesia has offered him two free flights as an apology.

H/T: Vice