This is a Trip Report from the Premium Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
Seat
Cabin Crew
Check – In
We arrived at Mobay in plenty of time for check in, we were quickly called to the UC check in – the agent confused me with another passenger with the same name & seemed to have problems counting my cases (I had 2). It took a good 15 mins to complete check in even with a supervisor getting involved. We were told the flight was on time
Boarding
Boarding commenced a few minutes late, there seemed to be loads of wheelchair passengers which slowed things down (some of which seemed to make remarkable recoveries once on board!). We eventually reached our planned seats (we had carried out OLCI the night before) other people in our resort did not take my advice & ended up with seats downstairs (thanks V-flyer for the tip!).
The usual fizzy wine was passed round and we settled down for departure....only it didn’t happen! It appeared that there was an extra bag on board. I was singled out to have my receipts and passport checked, I did wonder if the confusion over the names had caused the problem. After about an hour we were told the bag had been located & was going to be removed & we would be on our way in 20 mins. Sadly this wasn’t the case & eventually the Captain got involved, to cut a long story short the Cpt blamed a computer problem and the delay ended up just short of 3 hrs. We were not well informed and it all seemed to lack urgency. We had 2 pretzel runs to keep us going!
The Flight
So off we went nearly 3 hrs late, the meal was served which was ok, my wife had Jerk Chicken & I had a Caribbean pot roast with red wine, no after dinner drinks!
The plan for most of the aircraft was to get some sleep, so on with the noise cancelling headphones...and recline the seat. The only problem was the seat hardly reclined, whilst my wife’s reclined well. I asked the attendant if I was doing something wrong and after checking it said “oh it must be broken” & walked off – no apology! The seat itself was lumpy so sleep was difficult.
The flight crew seemed as irritated us the passengers at the delay & the attitude to my broken seat was disappointing.
We landed just under 3 hrs late tired and disappointed with the experience.
We struggled to get down the stairs to get off the plane as the economy passengers were barging through, no VS staff made any attempt to prevent this. Once off the plane we were quickly through security & our bags were with us in no time.
To sum up a less pleasant experience than the outbound flight, the delay seemed avoidable and an uncomfortable, minimum recline seat did nothing to add value.
