This is a Trip Report from the Premium Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
We arrived at LHR about 5 hours early (yes, we like to be early – we would rather 5 hours early than 5 minutes late) and surprisingly (!) there was no-one else queuing at the check in. We had done on-line check in the day before (seq 8 & 9) so just dropped our bags. The check in lady was very polite and efficient and explained to us that even though our bags were tagged to Key West we would need to reclaim them at Miami and then check in again for our American Eagle flight to Key West. Security was fine and relatively quick.
After a nice breakfast at the Bridge Bar and wondering around Terminal 3 (not the best terminal going!) we headed for our gate to find Tinkerbell waiting for us. There were just 159 passengers on board – spare seats everywhere! Premium was less than half full – shame the arm rests don’t lift up though so you can stretch out more. We took off at 1215 just 25 minutes late but with a flight time of 8hrs 15mins we would be landing early. Fortunately we weren’t affected by Hurricane Irene (all New York and Boston flights were cancelled) and in fact she probably helped us as instead of flying up over Scotland, past Iceland and Greenland before heading down the coast to America we flew straight across the Atlantic.
The cabin crew were good and were constantly bringing water/juice around (and offering to re-fill our water bottles) which was great. I asked for and did manage to get two of the economy amenity kits as well – as we like the drawstring bag for wet swimming costumes etc!
We enjoyed the glass of sparkling wine before take-off and then a drink with pretzels shortly after. We both had the chicken dish for lunch which was nice – the pudding – was lovely and of course Bailey’s to finish. The in-flight entertainment was running fine and we managed to watch about 3 films – there was a good selection. The Ice-cream – choice of two flavours – was most welcome (although very frozen!). Just before landing we had the egg sandwich and cookie which was OK.
The flight was relatively smooth – just one or two bumpy spots when the seat belt-sign came back on. We landed around 3.40 pm local time – 40 minutes ahead of schedule. After the very long walk to immigration everything I had read about MIA immigration proved correct. We waited over an hour to get through immigration and when we arrived in the baggage hall it was chaos – as our flight had arrived so long ago the belt number was no longer displayed and when I finally found someone to ask we found our cases (along with loads of others) just left on the floor beside the carousel. This was the same for most of the carousels so our flight was not the only one affected. Then there was then a queue for clearing customs! It wasn’t clear that there were other exits further down the baggage hall that were empty and the messages on the PA system weren’t helpful or clear. Finally we made it through and then had to find where to go for our connecting flight to Key West. They seem to be doing a lot of construction work at MIA which didn’t help but we eventually found where to transfer our cases and then walked to the other terminal, check in and through security once again. The whole process took well over 2 hours! Fortunately we had a 4 hour lay-over so were fine for our flight – but it was a bit stressful to say the least – and I have to admit I would not fly into MIA again nor recommend it.
We finally boarded our American Eagle flight at 8 pm and took off about 45 mins later, a small prop plane! And after a very short (42 minutes flight) landed at Key West around 9.30 pm. They even managed to do a drinks run which we were impressed with – even if we were too tired to participate!
We flew home from MCO and I will do a separate report for that flight.
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