Budget Travel - Has anybody used Transavia - or know anything about them?

My parents will be spending Xmas in Rotterdam. I looked at http://www.transavia.com/en as they had very good rates, but we knew nothing about this company (or Basiq Air which kind of 'spawned' it).

As we had a rather bad experience with EUJet earlier this year (it has since folded ^ ) our confidence with unknown airlines is a bit shakey.
I decided not to go ahead with the booking once I realised that there was no mention of this airline on this forum - I thought this unusual.

Instead we booked through www.dutchflyer.co.uk and they will be travelling by train and ship instead - just over 6 hours.

As this is an airline we'd like to consider for the future, does anybody know ANYTHING about them?

Especially important to us as it looks like they will be flying to Calvi (Corsica)next year - where my mum's brother lives.

LapLap,

I've actually never flown w/ Transavia, although I have spent quite a lot of time next to their HQ.

I think their reputation is kosher, and I wouldn't hesitate to use RTM either - a very nice and convenient small airport indeed.

In any case, I wouldn't worry too much:
"Transavia Airlines is a subsidiary of
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Netherlands
Percent share 100%
Acquire date 1991
Details In June 2003 KLM increased its stake to 100% by acquiring the remaining 20% from the Nationale Investeringsbank."

A few other facts (I'm reading ATI):
- net profit of USD23.6m out of revenues of USD656.0m in 2004 (not bad in this industry!)
- 4.0m pax in 2004
- 24 a/c, 30 destinations
- won the Flight International Air Transport Award in 1998.
- Date established: 1966

...and they got rid of the BasiqAir brand at the start of 2005, FYI (AFAIK, the idea was to differentiate between their scheduled and charter ops)

okko

I took Transavia from Madrid to Amsterdam in August, and it was unremarkable.* It is a budget offshoot of KLM. The flight attendants sell food and drinks. I wouldn't worry about its safety or reliability.

*The flight attendants seemed to think there was an extra passenger for a while, and delayed the flight while they counted and recounted, but the plane eventually took off about an hour late.

About 7/8 years ago, in my first job which needed any real flying, I had to hop LON-AMS. Transavia were about 1/3 of the price of BA, so I agreed happily enough to try them.

Unfortunately, my LON-AMS flight was obviously feeding a AMS-somewhere in Africa flight, and the plane was full of Africans and their handluggage [no racial negatives here, but Africans do *tend* to carry a lot of handluggage ;) ]. Being young and green, I checked my little bag, and then didn't see it again for nearly two weeks - apparently it too went for an African excursion :(

My first and last time on Transavia - probably in no way representative of them now, but I had to get it off my chest :D

Just once! ;)

Mark

I've flown them a few times. Transavia has been around for a long long time - they staretd out as a (mostly) vacation charter company. Planes can be old but safety and maintanance seems to be excellent. They sell sandwiches on board that are very good. AFAIK they have good on-time record. Rotterdam is a super airport.

My parents have booked their xmas trips with 'dutchflyer', but it's nice to know that there is a sensibly priced alternative.
I personally prefer Rotterdam to Amsterdam culturally, so I am now looking forward to using this airline.

And I'm actually quite excited about the prospect of more choice of flights to Corsica next year.

Thanks to all of you for the comments!!!. I'm delighted to see that most of the replies are reassuring (there's a similar 'good/bad' ratio to these replies I'd expect to see if I'd enquired about Easyjet).